Usually I don’t post Facebook or Myspace news unless they are related to Analytics. But what Facebook recently announced is just once more pretty smart:
Facebook released a Javascript Client library that enables developers to extend their application to their own website.
“Rather than building your applications strictly within Facebook you can now extend the full functionality of the platform to your own website and leverage Facebook as the tool for managing members and their relationships.” Source
This means that a lot of companies now will build a Facebook app and let it run on a separate domain. The companies can then drive traffic from their “real website” to their Facebook app and vice versa.
After this new release, I believe that Facebook’s exposure in the web will increase drastically. Marketers will probably also love this. They now have the ability to crossmarket their Facebook widgets via search/print/radio… and via the Facebook platform.
I am not sure how far it will go (I never developed a Facebook app), but if the applications get better and better over the years, we won’t be far away from a “Facebook web”.
Kind of reminds me on the good old phpbb days and their open source code approach. First developers through the world developed modules/hacks for the CMS until it turned into a high-end solution, that anybody with a little PHP knowledge could customize.
Then the next wave of modules helped webmasters to offer modules /hacks, that increased the exposure in the web.
Facebook did all that, but even opened up a little more. Great move!
