Very cool announcement at Facebook today which will get a LOT of play. Well beyond what was in the Wall Street Journal article earlier this week that I linked to...
Facebook has opened their platform to outsiders building applications, or pushing content, through facebook. Very cool, and very expected.
But they have gone one step further - these apps can trigger what they call a "canvas page" an empty block about 80% of the width of the page (the rest of the real estate is wrapped in a facebook header and left hand skyscraper ad) that you can fill with whatever you like. Content. Application. Data.
Or ads.
Your ads. That you keep all the revenue from.
Or your transaction engine. That you keep all the revenue from.
It's one thing to open the platform; but to put their distribution (today they announced they are up to 24 million active users, 50% of whom are active DAILY; they expect that to get to 50 million by year-end, 75% of whom will be off-campus) behind distributing your ads is exactly what APIs and web services are all about, and why we at Mashery believe that free and open APIs are going to be a huge catalyst for building new business opportunities on the web.
Facebook has created a huge new reason for providers of content and data to open APIs, with terms of service that are tailored to this opportunity, and supporting Facebook markup language. Mashery can provide the necessary security, management, caching, rate limiting, and especially metrics/reporting to exploit this opportunity and the others to come. We're already starting to work on this with some pretty big clients.
ook
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