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Interesting to hear this right around the same time that Facebook announces devoting more resources to HTML5 because of the challenges involved in deploying upd

Interesting to hear this right around the same time that Facebook announces devoting more resources to HTML5 because of the challenges involved in deploying updates to several different native mobile apps.

wallflower 16y ago
If Facebook really wanted to "relieve" itself of the burden of maintaining native apps on everything from Blackberry to WinMo, they would open source the apps. Of course, this would require giving the public dev community access to internal Facebook/hidden APIs. There could be some really interesting apps if they weren't sandboxed into the restrictions of Facebook's public APIs. Giving more access cedes control and gives arms to spammers and hackers. Since a vocal minority will cry foul and presumably rally support (create a Facebook fan page) if an existing native app like WinMo was dropped, it is a smart long-term strategy to converge to HTML5. Google's strategy is to get more people using their apps, period. There must be an order of magnitude (or more) difference in how many people play Angry Birds instead of Google Mobile version 0.7.3.5675
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Uh, can you give any references to "hidden" Facebook APIs? Being in the process of currently developing a Facebook app, it seems to me the entire graph is exposed. The only question is permissions and Facebook's willingness to change APIs on a very regular basis (that is a dicey question but rather different). But "hidden" APIs?? You can find an open source Facebook library here: http://gitorious.org/qfacebook http://gitorious.org/qfacebook as well as many other places for different languages.
  - wanderr 16y ago
    There are most certainly hidden APIs, there are things that YouTube and Yelp are allowed to do, that you just can't do through any of the publicly documented APIs.
    - ramprabhu 16y ago
      The Yelp case isnt a hidden Api. Its (seems) more of a preferred Api Key. You can do a view source on Yelp and get the facebook api URL Yelp runs to get your name and birthday. but its essentially restricted to the above two fields as I tried getting my other details through that URL by replacing the user_name field with say user_location and Api failed saying the apik key doesnt have permissions for that field. BTW if all you want is to get some users name and birthday, you now have the Yelp apikey ( You did not hear that from me ;)
      - wanderr 16y ago
        There are other calls they make completely behind the scenes that, as far as I can tell, are completely secret. I don't use Yelp very often so I may be getting the terminology mixed up, but if you link your Yelp and FB accounts, and you "star" or "like" (or whatever they call it) something on yelp, it will automatically like it for you on Facebook _without_ sending any traffic between your computer and Facebook. They're obviously hitting Facebook from the server side, which would imply to me they're trying to keep the API call secret.
        ramprabhu 16y ago
        The way you do it would be to get the FB access_token in JavaScript, which is given to you once you authorize yelp. With this you can make an Api call to the api.facebook.com from any other computer. Its all public. Incase you provide offline_access, this access_token is almost valid for life (almost as FB doesnt give a expiry time on paper)
        wanderr 16y ago
        I understand how the API works, but there is no publicly documented call for liking something for a user, whichh is what yelp and youtube are able to do.
        wanderr 16y ago
  - lacker 16y ago
    There are a lot of hidden arguments that you can use that the Facebook API doesn't document. There are also undocumented properties of the FB object in JavaScript. This is especially true with fbml, which still lets you do some things the new API doesn't document. Just try to create an fb:request-form dynamically in a popup over flash - that's standard in many fb games and requires undocumented tricks.
ZoFreX 16y ago
> the challenges involved Facebook runs on C++, but is written in PHP, because it's easier to hire PHP developers. Apps run on ObjC / Java / etc and so that requires more developers, more languages. If it's just web apps instead, they can leverage their existing base of engineers. Certainly their native client for Android seems to be hurting from a lack of technical clout (for example, you can't read message threads if they get too long).

wallflower 16y ago

If Facebook really wanted to "relieve" itself of the burden of maintaining native apps on everything from Blackberry to WinMo, they would open source the apps. Of course, this would require giving the public dev community access to internal Facebook/hidden APIs. There could be some really interesting apps if they weren't sandboxed into the restrictions of Facebook's public APIs. Giving more access cedes control and gives arms to spammers and hackers. Since a vocal minority will cry foul and presumably rally support (create a Facebook fan page) if an existing native app like WinMo was dropped, it is a smart long-term strategy to converge to HTML5. Google's strategy is to get more people using their apps, period. There must be an order of magnitude (or more) difference in how many people play Angry Birds instead of Google Mobile version 0.7.3.5675

joe_the_user 16y ago
Uh, can you give any references to "hidden" Facebook APIs? Being in the process of currently developing a Facebook app, it seems to me the entire graph is exposed. The only question is permissions and Facebook's willingness to change APIs on a very regular basis (that is a dicey question but rather different). But "hidden" APIs?? You can find an open source Facebook library here: http://gitorious.org/qfacebook http://gitorious.org/qfacebook as well as many other places for different languages.
- wanderr 16y ago
  There are most certainly hidden APIs, there are things that YouTube and Yelp are allowed to do, that you just can't do through any of the publicly documented APIs.
  - ramprabhu 16y ago
    The Yelp case isnt a hidden Api. Its (seems) more of a preferred Api Key. You can do a view source on Yelp and get the facebook api URL Yelp runs to get your name and birthday. but its essentially restricted to the above two fields as I tried getting my other details through that URL by replacing the user_name field with say user_location and Api failed saying the apik key doesnt have permissions for that field. BTW if all you want is to get some users name and birthday, you now have the Yelp apikey ( You did not hear that from me ;)
    - wanderr 16y ago
      There are other calls they make completely behind the scenes that, as far as I can tell, are completely secret. I don't use Yelp very often so I may be getting the terminology mixed up, but if you link your Yelp and FB accounts, and you "star" or "like" (or whatever they call it) something on yelp, it will automatically like it for you on Facebook _without_ sending any traffic between your computer and Facebook. They're obviously hitting Facebook from the server side, which would imply to me they're trying to keep the API call secret.
      - ramprabhu 16y ago
        The way you do it would be to get the FB access_token in JavaScript, which is given to you once you authorize yelp. With this you can make an Api call to the api.facebook.com from any other computer. Its all public. Incase you provide offline_access, this access_token is almost valid for life (almost as FB doesnt give a expiry time on paper)
        wanderr 16y ago
        I understand how the API works, but there is no publicly documented call for liking something for a user, whichh is what yelp and youtube are able to do.
        wanderr 16y ago
- lacker 16y ago
  There are a lot of hidden arguments that you can use that the Facebook API doesn't document. There are also undocumented properties of the FB object in JavaScript. This is especially true with fbml, which still lets you do some things the new API doesn't document. Just try to create an fb:request-form dynamically in a popup over flash - that's standard in many fb games and requires undocumented tricks.

ZoFreX 16y ago

> the challenges involved Facebook runs on C++, but is written in PHP, because it's easier to hire PHP developers. Apps run on ObjC / Java / etc and so that requires more developers, more languages. If it's just web apps instead, they can leverage their existing base of engineers. Certainly their native client for Android seems to be hurting from a lack of technical clout (for example, you can't read message threads if they get too long).