Facebook added as a source!

Just a week after Facebook launched their new Graph API, we released support for Facebook as a FeedMagnet content source. You can now run searches across all public posts in Facebook or pull in all of the public posts from a specific user or group of users - just like you could already with Twitter and Flickr.

Live buzz content

Prior to us adding Facebook support, the majority of "live buzz" content in FeedMagnet came from Twitter. While Google News, RSS, Flickr, and the other sources we support are great, they tend to have updates a few times a day, rather than a few times a minute. What that meant was that live events and online feeds meant to show live buzz got most of their content from Twitter.

Now that Facebook is available, setting up searches on both Facebook and Twitter for common brand names and event keywords tends to result in about a 50/50 split between Facebook and Twitter - effectively doubling the volume of live content that we can display through FeedMagnet.

What about all the privacy concerns with Facebook?

Facebook used to be a closed community - only your friends could see the things that you posted. Twitter also has a a closed mode, but most people leave their accounts public in Twitter, which was a fundamental difference between Twitter and Facebook until recently. A little while back, Facebook made a change that allowed individual posts from users to be set as public - accessible to everyone. Users were given the option to set the default for new posts to be public, and many of them did.

Soon after Facebook opened up the possibility for public posts, they provided a way for users to search those posts on Facebook.com. Even more recently, they released the Facebook Graph API, which allows 3rd party sites - like FeedMagnet - to search across that same content. Only the posts that are set as public - available to the world - are available through searching the Graph API. What that means is that the only content we pull in from Facebook is content that users have already declared as being public for the world.

How did we do it so fast?

The fact that we were able to integrate with Facebook so quickly demonstrates an aspect of FeedMagnet that is less noticeable on the surface. We designed our Electro system (the part of FeedMagnet that gathers content from the Web) to be "source agnostic" - meaning it can work with virtually any source. To add a new source like Facebook, we just have to write a small connection layer to tell Electro how to talk to it.

The benefit of being source agnostic is that FeedMagnet is not tied to a specific content source. If Twitter - or even Facebook - end up declining and are replaced by newer social media communities, we'll be able to work with them. The world of social media is changing rapidly, and we've built FeedMagnet to be able to keep up. Adding Facebook support gets us current. Location support for sources like Gowalla and Foursquare will likely come next. After that, who knows?