Facebook Opens Third Party Applications to Public Web

Last week, Facebook quietly removed the sign in restrictions that previously hid third party applications from the public Web. In other words, Facebook now allows its applications to be viewable on the Web by anonymous visitors and indexable by search engines. Until now, if someone visited the URL of a Facebook application, they were asked to log in or sign up before they could see any pages of the application. Now, the application developer can allow some or all parts of the application to be viewable from anonymous Web users before deciding whether they wish to sign in or register with Facebook. This is a significant change and was not widely reported.

Essentially, Web developers now have the choice of building an application using Facebook's platform that can be used by anyone on the Internet - not just Facebook members. In doing so, developers can leverage Facebook's login and registration as well its other platform services, which are becoming more and more substantial.

Here's how it works: If a user who happens to have a Facebook account visits your Web site and wants to register, you allow them to do this through Facebook. If a user who already has a Facebook account wishes to use your application, they can just sign in with their existing account. If people email links to or blog about your Web site, the links will actually work for anonymous Web users rather than show a Facebook sign up page.

You can see this at work in the Lending Library application. The home page, browse and search, detail and about pages are open to the public. If a Web user wishes to use a feature that requires registration, they are redirected to the Facebook sign up process.

Technorati Tags: authentication, facebook, facebook applications

When an anonymous user visits a Facebook application, any member profile information it displays is transparently handled by Facebook according to each member's own privacy rules. When Facebook began listing member profiles in public search engines, it gave users the option of whether to appear and what information to provide publicly.

Facebook developers are no longer writing code for a limited audience. Their applications can be viewed by the entire Web. Of course, there are a lot of downsides to leaving your application vulnerable to the ever changing policy rules at Facebook which should be taken into acccount.

While Yahoo! already offers third party authentication for Web developers, it lacks Facebook's growing audience (recently said to be 20M people) and rich, viral platform which its platform offers. Google currently does not offer third party authentication for Web users. Facebook may be trying to stake out ownership of a universal authentication gateway on the Web. It's not clear if this will cause further harm to the OpenID movement or perhaps motivate the open source community to work harder at evangelizing a public authentication alternative.

You can read the Facebook application announcement below:

At Facebook, we're always striving to make a more open environment for developers while respecting our users' privacy. So far, we've enforced this by requiring users to sign up for Facebook before being able to interact with an application. Unfortunately, this means applications are inaccessible to the millions of people on the Internet that haven't joined Facebook yet. This policy also prevents applications from being indexed by search engines that might fuel their growth. Clearly, this is not ideal for developers.

As of tonight, 12/4/07, this will no longer be a problem. We will start allowing people to access application canvas pages even when not logged in to Facebook. Of course, we're concerned about our users' privacy, and so the only user-specific data available on public canvas pages will be first name and profile picture (and then only if the user's profile picture is already publicly searchable). But you, the application developer, need not worry; FBML tags will automatically handle privacy rules for you.

The technical details of making your pages publicly accessible are on the wiki at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Public_Canvas_Pages.

Comments

[savas]

At this point, you’re probably thinking, big deal. So people could own their own domain names for free, but what difference does that really make? You can let people route their online communication with other people through their domain names by pointing it at their MySpace page, receiving email thru it, and maybe basing their instant messaging name on it. Cool, but only geeks will "get it" at this point, and does it really provide enough value to make the average person care? No, probably not. Yet.

[Facebook for Business]

this is really remarkable thing to participate in social media sites like facebook and now can be crawled by search engine and drive traffic.

[Uskudar]

You can let people route their online communication with other people through their domain names by pointing it at their MySpace page, receiving email thru it, and maybe basing their instant messaging name on it