Facebook Hooks Up With Adobe For Richer Social Applications In Flash

Not to be outdone by MySpace announcing a deeper partnership with Microsoft yesterday, bringing Silverlight technology to its development platform and mobile application, Facebook and Adobe are today announcing a partnership and the release of fresh Flash client libraries to make it easier for developers to plug into the Facebook Platform inside their social applications built with Flash.

Flash has been supported since the launch of Facebook Platform in 2007 through tags, embedding Flash in Feed stories, and multiple client libraries, which have helped developers make Facebook API calls directly from ActionScript (see example on the Red Bull website). But Facebook felt the exisiting ActionScript client libraries were not up to par, so it teamed up with Adobe to tweak the open source version to support all Facebook APIs and add some features to better support authentication for both Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect.

After the PHP, JavaScript and iPhone client library, the all new ActionScript 3.0 Client Library for Facebook Platform is now the fourth officially supported client library for the Facebook Platform. The code can be downloaded here.

Facebook and Adobe Systems will share more about the new partnership on April 2 at a San Francisco event.