Facebook offers developers better access to data
The social network announces an update to the site's application programing interface that will make it easier for developers to build Facebook apps.
As the dog days of summer come to a close, Facebook today introduced several developer updates that the company touted as among some of its most significant to date.
The changes to Facebook's Graph application programing interface (API) are meant to foster "easier and faster to access data from the social graph," software engineer Harshdeep Singh wrote in his post. The upshot: to allow web and mobile developers to access the exact data they need with less work. This means less time sending requests to Facebook for access and -- theoretically -- more time left over for developing.
Developers use the feeds to build games and other applications on top of Facebook's open graph data.
Twitter's recent shakeup with developers also shows how intertwined social networks and developers can be. After Twitter tightened its developer rules, restricting access to its API, some developers expressed frustration and anger at being cutoff from a platform they essentially helped popularize.