Facebook Launches Chat

Facebook announced that they will be launching Facebook Chat soon.

They will roll out Chat features gradually. It won't require any installation, the new chat bar will appear at the bottom of the browser window, like GTalk sidebar in GMail. You will also be able to receive notifications from your mini-feed and applications if you choose to, in the chat bar. It will provide the common features like maintaining chat history, invisible mode, etc.

But now the question is, does any one really need one more IM? I think it's definitely useful when you don't have all the Facebook friends on your existing IM clients. One more important feature would be allowing chat with people outside of Facebook, that might allow people to grow their social network. Another thing to observe is the reverse trend of social networking website providing instant messaging application.

Facebook = Blackhole?

Is Facebook A Black Hole For Personal Info? Apparently if you delete your profile, your profile not only still exists but is accessible to outside users. A dude tried to delete his Facebook profile, found out the information was still available on Facebook servers and started an email campaign to have Facebook remove his information. Facebook emailed him back saying that they deleted his account. Well almost... a reporter later found his empty profile and was still able to contact him through the network.

The Facebook API

I've always been interested in the Facebook API but I never really got a chance to actually look up how to write a Facebook application. So, after a bit of googling I found a few decent tutorials and learned a few interesting things.

Here is a PHP Facebook tutorial, a Python Facebook tutorial and even a Java Facebook tutorial. I also found some helpful information on demystifying the application form.

To briefly summarize, it seems that you can write your Facebook application in whatever language you want. Your application will still needs to use the Facebook API as well as some FBML tags but developers are not limited to just FBML. This is because of the architecture Facebook uses to run the applications. A developer hosts their code on an external server and whenever a user makes a request of that application, Facebook makes a request of the code running on the external server. Facebook then can display the application.

Some pretty interesting stuff and certainly some good starting points for those of you interested in creating Facebook applications.