Facebook Platform API
So I finally got around to playing with the Facebook Platform API yesterday and my initial take is that there’s a lot of potential to leverage the API and extract and transform the data the resides on Facebook. Of all the API functions, I think ‘fql.query’ alongside understanding the Facebook Query Language gives you the most power to pull and analyze the social and marketing data that resides on their servers around millions of users.
Simply having the ‘uid’ of a user, along with the ‘Users.getInfo‘ function, gives you a ton of information about that user and the only limitation is the user themselves. Unless a Facebook user realizes the security concerns of the data that they’re sharing, their information is free for anyone to see and extract.
PHP is the language of choice for most Facebook developers I think (myself included) but I decided to take the ASP.NET / C# route to see how I could integrate it with Consona CRM. The Facebook Developer Toolkit, which just released a new version (lucky for me) is fairly comprehensive but because it’s so new, the documentation needs some polishing up and there’s not many code samples out there yet around it. I created a quick and dirty solution that takes the customer information and passes it to Facebook to either pull up the customer Facebook profile information or run a search and see if that customer is a Facebook user. One issue that I’ve run into so far is the around the session data. If a parent frame has a different domain than the child page in IE, the session data (stored in the Session object) is not preserved as a security precaution. So unless I preserve the initial session that is created, the user currently needs to login each time a new customer record is pulled up.
