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]
Wow! Finally! This is awesome news. I really wish Tweetdeck would get on the ball with list integration.
You can already get access to Facebook lists: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Friends.getLists
That was my first thought, but the doc does say that you can’t republish such lists to anyone but the logged-in user.
Friend lists are available through both friends.getLists, which wraps around the friendlist and friendlist_member FQL tables (http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Friendlist_%28FQL%29 and http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Friendlist_member_%28FQL%29). The reason why republishing the lists is disallowed is for privacy. Example: user could have a friend list for “people I secretly hate”, which they wouldn’t want applications to republish to their friends.
yeah, talked to loic (who has obviously tried to get this for a while, hence the question), this is currently not possible for services like this.
It’s very possible. He just can’t create new lists with the API. He can filter the stream with the lists, but can’t share or create lists.
Yeah – it’s very possible. See the API docs. I even know services utilizing it. Seesmic could integrate lists if they wanted to. I don’t think Loic understands this.
BTW, Facebook lists have been available via the API for close to a year now. Brett’s new to Facebook – I’m assuming he just wasn’t aware.
Interesting services but share friend lists to third parties for what?
Am I the only person who thinks this whole friends list thing is getting a little too overhyped?
nope VGA me ether.
Wow, the lines sure are getting blurred, aren’t they.
I still see Facebook as THE social network and the most like chatting with friends.
Twitter, especially because things scroll off so quickly once you have more than 50 friends and has no permanent “wall” to view what people have written to you, will never get to that level of intimacy with me between my friends and me.
Already many of us have status comments being sent to both FB and Twitter at the same time… but whatever can be done to improve the communcations seems good to me.
Both are good tools and I’m rooting that they both continue.
Charles Seymour Jr
http://UltimateWorkAtHomeDads.com
All of these lists, however, have these weird limitations and funny ways they are cobbled together. Wave actually does fix this, too bad nobody’s using it!
I am today:
http://bit.ly/6Vhrk6
Join me if you are in Wave.
There will be “real time” in the future, but the future is not to be found in the Real Time crunchup
My take on why this Real Time is so much about today that it’s missing the big picture about the future:
http://bit.ly/5MIme4
Such a mish mosh of craziness.
“Easy-to-make Facebook and Twitter social graph mashups” are the win here? I think the fact that clients will be able to populate columns with FB lists like Seesmic does with Twitter lists is the most clear benefit.
Sounds positive but definitely needs to be an opt -in feature. I can’t think of a better way for people to snoop on others without permission if they can view a friend list automatically
sh*t. I have lists like “random chicks”
Hmm.. I hear you too. I’ve been using lists as a security policy. For example I have Lists like : “Profesional”, “Limited Profile”, “Caution”, “Trusted” …
I see where FB is going with this (aiming to kill twitter). But what am I suppose to do with these ’security’ lists?
Just wait for MSFaceBitter!
Chiming in, Facebook already has lists and will pull a stream for them, they also have pages, apps, and filters. None of this does a third party any good because they would not have access to the posts from anyone on the list unless they where confirmed friends.
Until facebook defaults posts to public AND supports a useful searching mechanism they can’t offer what twitter offers.
What am i missing?
Why do they need to be public like Twitter? Why doesn’t Seesmic just respect the privacy of the user for now? No one is using the public side of Twitter lists right now anyway (look at the numbers compared to Twitter’s overall userbase).
Mixing the social graphs will be very valuable for people and businesses to discover better social context.
MashedIn.com is starting to show what is possible mixing the 2 graphs.