One of the more interesting announcements coming out of f8 was the relaxation on the prohibition of cacheing data for more than 24 hours. Now I’ve always thought that this prohibition came from the privacy world – don’t save people’s information because it isn’t yours. Turns out, it isn’t a privacy thing at all – it’s really a user experience issue. The problem with holding on to people’s data is what happens if it changes? If you store the data and rely on it being current, things will fall apart when the user changes it several weeks from when you stored it. However, if you can only hold onto it for 24 hours, the chances of something going wrong go down dramatically.
These concerns go away now because of the new service that allows developers to register with Facebook to be notified when a user’s information changes. This will allow any cached data to be updated without any concerns of getting out of whack. This can dramatically simplify writing applications, and it was one new feature that seems to be universally embraced by developers.
And how does this affect FriendRunner? The FriendRunner profiler features that allow developers to see what APIs get called during the execution of their application become more important. There is now no excuse at all to call the same API with the same data, since the result may be cached, FriendRunner can help you find these types of problems, and identify places where you can optimize your code.
The new Facebook Graph API announced at f8 represents a revolution in the way that Facebook applications will be developed from here on in. You want to get a list of a users’ friends? No longer will you need to weed through the PHP documentation to try to figure out which API to call, and which parameters to pass. Now, all you need to do is make a simple RESTful HTTP call, and get a nicely formatted JSON response in return. How do you format the REST call? Pretty simple, I’m guessing that after you do 2 or 3 of these it will become second nature, and you won’t even need to look at the documentation.
So how will this affect FriendRunner? My initial thoughts is that it will affect FriendRunner in a positive way. All of the original API will still be in force, so nothing there will change. What will change it that FriendRunner will need to support all of the REST API calls at https://graph.facebook.com. But that won’t be so hard because it’s simply getting at the same data that we already provide, just in a different way. But even if it is hard, that’s okay – we subscribe to the “Why does Rice play Texas” philosophy.
Since the RESTful API is language agnostic, the FriendRunner support can be written any way we want, and not necessarily in PHP. This makes us very happy.
Stay tuned to get more information about when we’ll have the new API coded up and ready. In the meantime, all of the investment you’ve made in wriing Facebook apps the old way is secure, and your apps will continue to work. And FriendRunner will continue to be available for testing them.
We’re here in San Francisco at the f8 conference awaiting all of the cool new Facebook things that are announced today. We’ve already experienced the Presence technology that looks pretty cool.
We hope to update later today some of the announcements, and how FriendRunner will fit in.
We’ll be in San Francisco on April 21 and 22 for f8 2010, Facebook’s premier developer conference. If you’d like to learn more about FriendRunner, see a demo, or you’d simply like to talk about testing Facebook applications, send us a note at f8@friendrunner.com.
We’re looking forward to meeting you there.
Yes, if the rumors are true, Facebook will unveil its Location API during the f8 developer conference next month. What could one do with location information? Hmm, lots of things – some really cool, some really evil. Some ideas always bubble to the top of the list such as games that make use of real space, location-based advertising, mapping/direction applications, where are my friends, and the list goes on (I’ll leave it to you do decide good/evil).
So where is FriendRunner in all of this? We plan to support the entire API so that you can run meaningful tests (assuming you’ll be writing applications that take location into account). FriendRunner already allows you to test with whatever demographics you like (i.e. you need to see what happens if 5000 seniors in the eastern USA access your application simultaneously, we’ve got you covered). With location, we’ll be able to take that one step further. If you need to see what happens to your application if someone jumps into a cab in Paris, but you’re in an office in Sunnyvale, FriendRunner is there to help you.
If you’re planning to build on the Facebook Location API, and would like to learn how FriendRunner can help you, let us know.
f8 | admin | 
April 22, 2010 11:57 am | 
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