When Facebook released V1.0 of their API, I started messing around with it. I ended up making an application called Your True Self which I posted on Facebook and sent to a few friends. Much to my surprise, I discovered that it was featured on the CommandN program – very cool. If you’d like to give the application a try, just click here and you’ll be asked to log in with the Facebook API.
The idea behind Your True Self is pretty simple. In the about section, I wrote:
“Your True Self” is a simple recommender system that utilizes the principle of Homophily. Homophily theorizes that humans like to associate with people with which they share interests, tastes and preferences.
This recommender simply looks at the profiles of your friends, and makes novel (i.e. stuff you haven’t already listed) recommendations based on their tastes and preferences. To learn more about homophily, you can read its Wikipedia entry, this blog post or this academic paper.
I’ve got a few other features in the pipeline, but they (and most everything else in my life) won’t get much attention until after the semester ends (yes, it is now crunch time).
About the Facebook API – the API is well documented, easy to use and pretty robust – except for one thing. The Facebook API does not allow you to see anyone else’s friend network, which absurdly limits the usefulness of the API. Basically, the API can’t do anything social, and how Facebook messed that one up is beyond me. It makes the API a lot less fun. Until they fix that critical shortcoming I have a feeling most API apps will be from third-party vendors or little one-offs like the one I created. Without “social” functions, there’s really little incentive to invest time into developing anything with the Facebook API.
That is a totally awesome service. I’ve been talking for a while about how the principals of stumble upon should be combined with social discovery. The service that pulls together the digg, stumble upon, blue dot and facebook will be the best way of meeting cool people. And meeting new people is something that not a lot of social networking sites encourage.
Once this has been set up, the systems should try to created strong ties. So as opposed to just adding as a friend there should be games (in the broadest possible sense), online projects and IRL meetings.
I’d love to see the new things you add to that.
I was at a conference where Mark Zuckerberg spoke and Facebook’s CTO was there as well, sounds like this year they will be putting a lot of emphasis into developing the API v2 to be much better.