I lust for Friend Lists, and more
Justin Smith’s InsideFacebook blog broke that the Facebook API may soon include the functions friends.getLists and friends.getListMembers. These were only visible for a short time, when some internal code (yes, FB developers use the same tools as app developers) was accidentally pushed public. Since organizing my hundreds of very different friends is an essential need for me, and I spend a chapter of my book on it, this difficult topic excites me. I could build a Friend organizer app, but this and top friends needs to be integrated into the core of platform.
Fred Stutzman muses that this could be a first step to allowing us to roll our own custom networks: for our own church, or my small unsupported company. This would require the Lists to be public, rather than just private labels for my own grouping for friends. For example, on IM I create my own buddy lists, but I can’t organize and publish a shared buddy list for my company. I fervently hope it is true that FB takes Lists to that next level. Even for private lists, an App could read and aim to semantically organize these lists for sharing among friends who have the app.
Top Friends, and Slide which created the App, should release an API for it, so that any application can use that information to guide its own flow. For example, I’d like to first offer invites to I Am Green to the Top Friends of a new user. A new member is more likely to invite friends that they feel close to, for a serious, personal application. I spoke with their top developers about it, and while they like the idea and acknowledge the utility, I saw some hesitation. I suspect it is against the TOS to offer application specific information to someone who hasn’t installed the app. Protecting yet severely limiting, and FB’s platform itself doesn’t have that limit of course.
Comments on the post by top application developer Trey Philips noted that groups.join will also be added, and that this one already is recognized as a valid entry in the developer wiki. If this means we can automatically send invitations to groups, this will be extremely powerful, and demonstrates that FB will promote their platform tools heavily. An administrator can message groups, and group activity (like adding a photo or a FB video) gets promoted on the Feed. For I Am Green, I’ve been asking people to add themselves to various organizing and local groups, so I’m delighted. I do notice that this ties my application more closely to the platform, by encouraging me to add functionality that only is possible on FB.
