Facebook: Got it backwards?

Apparently a lot of the people who are making this kind of comment about the Facebook API haven't actually given it a good look. Their original API does exactly what she's asking for: it let's you use Facebook's friend data, among other things, on your own external sites. This new version still does that, but it also allows you to embed your application inside of Facebook, as well as add data from your application, like Twitter updates, to people's profiles. If you don't want to embed your app inside of Facebook, you don't have to.

Facebook has added features that make it far easier to find and use external applications based on the API, but for some reason people think that's a bad thing? I don't get it. Yeah, if your app relies heavily on Facebook you'll be locked in, but every other API has that same effect. It's the nature of the beast.

I think the reason why this is throwing people off is because Facebook really isn't a discrete application itself. When you use the Google Maps API, you're building on top of that map and embedding it directly into the page. You basically get everything Google was already offering in that widget. With the Flickr API, you get to do neat things with pictures, and put those in your pages. With Facebook, what would you be embedding? At its most basic level, Facebook is the friend graph, with all sorts of other things piled on top of it. Most of what you care about is who is friends with who, and it's harder to visualize that than it is with most other sites out there that offer APIs.

But anyway, they didn't get it backwards. They made the API more valuable to third party developers by integrating it into the site more, while still giving you the freedom to have your entire site live outside of Facebook. In turn, that will make Facebook more valuable to its users, which is kind of the whole point. I guess people expect offering APIs to be some sort of act of altruism.

Not the only thing.