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Opening Up Facebook Status, Notes, Links, and Video to Facebook Platform

February 6, 2009ByChris Putnam

We're launching several new APIs for Facebook Platform today. These new interfaces open up access to the content and methods for sharing through several Facebook Applications -- including Facebook Status, Notes, Links (what we used to call Posted Items), and Video -- to go along with the APIs already available for uploading and viewing through Facebook Photos. We've seen increasing engagement with over 15 million users updating their status each day and sharing over 24 million links per month. We wanted to make sure this content and the ability to share this content was available through our standard APIs.

Specifically, your applications can now directly access all of a user's status, links, and notes via new methods and FQL calls. Your application will have access to any status, notes, or links from the active user or their friends that are currently visible to the active user. In addition, we're opening new APIs for you to post links, create notes, or upload videos for the current user, and we've made setting a user's status easier.

We're pretty excited to see what kinds of ideas you can come up with to help users create and share more content. For example, a travel application could make it really easy for users to create and share notes and upload photos and videos from a recent trip. Users could then display that content within a profile tab for that app. Or a news website could use Facebook Connect to allow users to easily post links from the site and feature all of the most recent links that a user's friends have shared from that website.

Every user is subject to limits on the length and size of the video files they can upload, just like they are when uploading through Facebook. Use video.getUploadLimits to determine a specific user's limits. To increase video upload limits, users can "verify" their accounts with Facebook. One simple way to verify an account is by confirming a mobile phone number with Facebook. You can determine whether a user has verified their account using FQL. You can render different content for verified users with the new FBML tag fb:if-is-verified.

As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback in our Developer Forum.


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