How-to: using the new Facebook stream API in a desktop app - Ars Technica

Description

Facebook launched a new set of APIs on Monday that allow third-party software to interact with the Facebook activity stream. Developers can use these new APIs to build sophisticated Facebook client applications that give users direct access to the stream from their desktop.

Courtesy of these APIs, rich support for Facebook could soon arrive in your favorite Twitter client and other social networking programs. In this article, I'll give you an inside look at how I used the new APIs to add full support for the Facebook stream in Gwibber, my own open source microblogging client for Linux.

The activity stream includes several kinds of content, including status updates, images, links, videos, and content that is imported from other services, such as Delicious bookmarks and Google Reader shared items. Users can post comments on stream items and can also indicate that they "like" a specific stream item. Facebook now provides programmatic access to all of this data through several different mechanisms. Developers can use a conventional REST method, a FQL query, or an Atom-based feed.

Atom Activity Extensions

The Atom-based feed is, perhaps, the most intriguing aspect of the new open streams system. Atom is a standardized XML-based format for simple syndication that is similar to RSS but is more robust and extensible. Rather than completely inventing its own dialect, Facebook wisely chose to put its weight behind Atom Activity Extensions, an emerging effort to build a standardized set of activity tags that can be used in Atom feeds.

Atom Activity Extensions is still in the draft stage and is not yet a formal standard. The draft is authored by David Recordon and Martin Atkins of Six Apart under the aegis of the DiSo project, a collaborative effort to build open standards for data portability and social networking.

Facebook ...

Original URL

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/04/how-to-using-the-new-facebook-stream-api-in-a-desktop-app.ars

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/04/how-to-using-the-new-facebook-stream-api-in-a-desktop-app.ars