Facebook Agrees To Set Friend Lists Free. Mashups With Twitter Lists Should Follow.
Posted by Unknown | | Posted On Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 8:41 AM
Today, during the Filtering the Stream roundtable at our RealTime CrunchUp, Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur
asked why Facebook isn’t giving third parties access to their Friend Lists. Obviously, that’s a good question now that Twitter has starting giving third parties access to its Lists feature via an API. Normally, you’d expect a canned response along the lines of “we may do that in the future” or “we’re thinking about it,” but Facebook’s VP of Platform Bret Taylor
was much more candid.
Taylor said that Le Meur’s request seemed “reasonable” and continued “we should do that.” “We’re not working on that. But we should be,” he continued. So there you go, done deal. Great. It would seem that soon, third parties should have access to the list filters that Facebook uses.
Here’s why this matters. With services like Seesmic
(Desktop) and Brizzly
importing data from both Twitter and Facebook, the social graph for those services is starting to get messy. If there were a way to merge Twitter Lists and Facebook Friend Lists, third-party services could provide a valuable new service: Easy-to-make Facebook and Twitter social graph mashups.
Granted, it seems unlikely at this point that either Twitter or Facebook will ever sync these lists with one another on their respective services. But as long as they’re willing to provide that data to third-parties, other companies should be able to do interesting things with it.
The Lists, it seems, are starting to merge.
[Photos: (cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.thelettertwo.com
]
Website: twitter.com Location: San Francisco, California, United States Founded: March 21, 2006 Funding: $155M Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006… Learn More
Website: facebook.com Location: Palo Alto, California, United States Founded: February 1, 2004 Funding: $716M Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 300 million users.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard… Learn More
Website: seesmic.com Location: San Francisco, California, United States Founded: June 1, 2007 Funding: $12M Seesmic is a social software application site offering Seesmic Desktop, an Adobe Air application that integrates multiple Twitter accounts and your Facebook account and Facebook pages. Seesmic also offers a browser based client for Twitter.
Company: Thing Labs Website: brizzly.com Launch Date: July, 2009 Brizzly is a social media reader from Thing Labs, Inc. It currently works with Twitter and Facebook, and adds features like inline media (photos, videos & maps) expansion, muting, groups, IM-like direct messaging and more.
Brizzly launched in July… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBase
Freedom for your friends list!! Yipee!
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