Facebook opens API but doesn’t allow you to store conversation
The other day I wrote about what it could mean for consumer marketing if Facebook opened up its conversation stream the way Twitter has done. Essentially it would allow companies to tap into not only the actions but also the thoughts of target consumers. Obviously unbelievable and somehow eerily futuristic, yet it’s happening now. In any case, it’s now happened. Techcrunch reported today that Facebook has opened up its API to allow third parties to index the status streams of users, essentially creating the possibility for real-time conversation search.
Unfortunately, according to Techcrunch, Facebook is still clinging onto some remnants of its previous ‘walled garden’ mentality by only allowing third parties to cache the conversation stream for 24 hours. That’s bad news. No archiving = no meaningful search.
How long will this policy hold ? Seeing as how flaky their recent decison making has been, probably not long at all, the pressure will become too great and sooner, rather than later, Facebook will be forced to let go of the idea that it owns the conversation. It only owns the flow of it for a short period of time. It would do better to focus its energies on its other high value product : Facebook connect. Facebook Connect is in practice what OpenID was meant to be in theory. It has every chance of becoming the web’s first real single sign-on universal id, a feat that has eluded so many companies before it. Good luck to them, because that would make the web a whole lot easier to work with for all of us.
Tagged as api, facebook, openid, techcrunch + Categorized as marketing, social networks