I decided to have a look at the facebook API tonight and see whats available and what isn’t. I was shocked to find out that facebook literally have their own mark-up language now called FBML

Local entrepreneur, Tyler Reed, and I started a mini conversation via Facebook and we both agree that Facebook is starting to redefine the internet. Personally I know of quite a few people that couldn’t even use email that have now learnt to use it just so that they could register for facebook. There is actually a demand for FBML developers and for PHP developers that interface with facebook.

Obviously he couldn’t elaborate on the type of projects that he has been approached to do due to confidentialty clauses but it really got me thinking. How big is Facebook? MySpace was big for a while and has almost died as far as I am concerned. I don’t see people’s MySpace pages been “advertised” in their email signatures anymore, now its a facebook link!

Although Google are massive, they haven’t exactly developed their own language yet. Now I know some people might say that I’m comparing apples to pears here but think about it. Google is currently one of the largest if not the largest Web Company in the world. They have developed many web tools for use developers to use but not an entire mark-up language!

Going back to the API, I had a look at the Facebook Developer Toolkit which is quite nice. This toolkit contains Windows and Web Controls for interacting with facebook. Personally I was hoping to write a windows application to send messages to my facebook contacts but it doesn’t seem like the API caters for this. Admittedly I only skimmed over the API in about 2 hours or so, so there might be that functionality and I just haven’t found it yet. Also, the facebook API hasn’t even been out that long and they are already starting to deprecate certain API calls!

The one thing I hope that facebook does is squash the Social Networking Websites popping up all over the place. Its really annoying having some people on MySapce, some one LinkedIn and some on Facebook. Yahoo is now trying something called Mash.

Now Mash, from what I’ve read, is a combination of MySpace and Facebook. It is still in a BETA phase so its currently invite only thing by the looks of it. The Social Networking market is completely saturated, what would be nice would be some way to link across the networks. I’m sure many others have thought of this idea, but I’ll be honest, I’m way too busy to try do something like that. I’ll leave the amazing things like that to all you web entrepreneurs out there

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