fbOpen API Analysis

Jason Kinner, our CTO, is leading our analysis of fbOpen, the recent open source project Facebook released to help the Facebook developer community. He has published a blog that describes the implementation in terms of number of API’s implemented.

Our goal at Ringside is to enable the Social Web. To that end we want to make it easy to develop socially aware applications that can run on any website as well as the big social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, etc. We let any website have their own social graph and also tie into the big social network graphs as well.

To make this possible, we want to make sure we implement the Facebook API in cooperation with the fbOpen project. Like I wrote in an earlier blog about Shindig and Open Social, fbOpen feels a lot like the early reference implementations of the J2EE specification that Sun put out. Something that obviously was not meant for production purposes, but could serve the community to assure compatibility and interoperability. As you can see from Jason’s table, Ringside is focused on creating a fuller social application server for any website.

Jason will be posting more as we dig into other areas of fbOpen like FBJS and FBML. We look forward to working with Facebook to bring about the power of the Social Web to everyone. Their initial work in defining an open platform over a year ago in many ways launched us down this path, and we are excited to see the continuation of this trend to open up their platform.

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