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PlatformArchitecture – Facebook
The Beginnings of Facebook Platform
Facebook has always recognized that using social context is an essential part of providing a great experience for users. That’s why we first released the Facebook Platform API in August 2006, which enabled developers to incorporate the data users chose to share into external websites and desktop applications in order to give users a more social experience wherever they were. The latest version of Facebook Platform also opened up the Facebook website itself, giving developers even stronger distribution models and access to all the integration points Facebook uses to build applications.
Facebook Platform unlocks significant value for both developers and users: it gives developers access to the core of Facebook’s value – the social graph – and gives users a better social experience on all Facebook applications, whether they’re inside or outside the Facebook website. A primary goal of Facebook has always been to make it easy for users to share information, and Facebook Platform opened up that information to benefit users and developers everywhere.
Developers’ Reception of Facebook Platform
Developers and users alike have embraced Facebook applications. 100,000 Facebook developers are currently building on Facebook Platform, and over 85% of Facebook users have used Facebook applications. Facebook Platform is open to all developers and companies, no matter what their size, goals or technical expertise. Our platform has been proven successful across audiences over the past 16 months, and we want to share the benefits of our work.
Opening up Facebook Platform Architecture
In the next step of opening up Facebook Platform, Facebook is now making its platform architecture available as a model for other social sites. Facebook will even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags for use by other platforms, which means that the 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications can make their applications available on other social sites with no extra work.
Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve. And by enabling our industry partners to use what we’ve learned, everyone benefits — users have a better social experience no matter where they are on the web, developers can make their applications available to new audiences, and social sites can offer more applications for their platform.
To clarify how you can use Facebook Platform as a model, we’re including some example FBML tag implementations, and also offer our test consoles and full documentation. Take a look at the High Level FBML Specification.
If you’d like to license the Facebook Platform methods or tags for your social site, please contact the Facebook Platform team at platform@facebook.com.
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/PlatformArchitecture