Facebook API
August 1st, 2005
In the age before Web 2.0 had a name I became very interested in freeing the data that was being stored in social websites. While Xanga was my first API that I wrote, Facebook was always my real interest. The API was released and quickly became extremely popular, specially because it allowed people to collect all sorts of information from people’s account. While this had negative repercussions, I left to the user of the API to choose what to do with it.
About 6 months later Facebook told me that I should remove the API in order to avoid legal action. About 3 months later they released their API which was significantly better, but also much less useful.
To this day I have been very negative of API’s offered by online services because they always give a false sensation of freedom.