sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/analyzing_the_f.html contains a very helpful and balanced appraisal of the Facebook API, now that it’s been around for a few weeks. The key points for me were:

• The amount of thought and effort that has gone into the API’s design at Facebook, and the opportunities it creates as a result
• The API gives very good access to Facebook data, from web services, a query language and a mark-up language that you use instead of HTML
• There are limitations on what you can do from a visual perspective, when you’re building with the API’s data, but you can create iframes that do their own thing
• Distribution is taken care of by Facebook’s application directory and a well-proven viral mechanism where Facebook members share good stuff with each other in a highly promiscuous way
• There’s a high risk to a company’s infrastructure if it deploys something that does go viral: some people are having to deploy hundreds of additional servers to cope with the traffic it is generating, at a high cost

I’d recommend anyone who is interested in social networking to read the whole article. It’s also very well written, which is in itself an excellent reason to read it.