Summary: Facebook announced new tools today which will soon be made available to developers that allow them to bring Facebook Fan Page functionality to any page on the web.
Earlier this afternoon, Facebook hosted its popular Developer Garage meetup in Palo Alto to brief developers on some new changes to Facebook’s policies for application development.
We’ve included a link to the full video on the right for your viewing pleasure but wanted to outline a few of the changes coming to the site which affect those who are using Facebook to promote their businesses online.
One of the most fascinating announcements was that a new API is being made available to developers in the next 6 months – the Open Graph API. API’s (Application Programmer Interface) allow third parties to access some of the data available on Facebook. A perfect example would be that of Facebook Connect and the fact you can login to this site using your Facebook account. If you want to leave a comment on any post here, you can just sign in with Facebook rather than creating a new account.
What is especially interesting about the Open Graph API is that businesses will now be able to reproduce most of the functionality of a “Fan Page” on their own web site, and effectively create two way communication between your site and Facebook’s.
The Open Graph API will enable any page on the web to have the same features that a fan page has that sits inside Facebook.com
The example that Ethan Beard, one of leads in the Facebook Platform Developer Network, provided was that of Coke. If Coke decided they wanted to manage their interactions with their Facebook fans on their own site, instead of Facebook’s, they could build the tools into their site using Open Graph and do it that way. The Open Graph API will allow two way communication between Facebook and your own site, where data can be placed on a users news feed from a site other than Facebook’s.
