Facebook Opens Activity Streams to Third-Party Developers

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on April 27, 2009 - 8:24am.

Palo Alto, Calif. - Facebook on Monday announced the release of new technology that will allow third-party developers to access Facebook data, which in turn will let users view their content streams and publish information to them from outside sites. The success of the Facebook Open Stream API will rely largely on whether the site's 200 million users choose to grant outside sites access to their personal data, including photos and comments.

The new feature will respect users' existing privacy settings.

The company's Facebook Connect platform already allows users to take their online identities across a network of websites, and publish actions taken on those sites in their Facebook streams.

Beta partners testing Facebook Open Stream API include the Seesmic Desktop, and a stream notifier based on Adobe's AIR platform.

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=79988352130

http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=225