…and what a party it was
Thank goodness I didn’t do that post I was planning on - talking about how Facebook’s APIs are only one way!
I met up with the Facebook geeks at the TechCrunch7 party - and they told me that indeed - the return path APIs “were coming”. They’re just dealing with the same issues all of us are dealing with:
a) the balance betwen freedom and safety (they’re terrified of letting ‘humans’ spew into their system. I told him: “Look - ONLY let in authenticated users and ONLY accept the fields that you already support - (we’re not expecting anything else.)
b) just how much is enough? - we know (from looking at the APIs) that they’re not done yet. But god bless them anyway for getting them out in time for the party! So now how far do they go? Do they include access to friends’ emails? Without that - we can’t do any auto-registering when we move our social networks into a new place. That’s pretty essential. But you gotta TRUST the person who moves your email.
c) when to release stuff? - their timing was perfect for me - but I can see where they’re coming from. They’re about 2/3rd of the way through - we’re also not done with our APIs yet either. Richard MacManus will be doing a report comparing our APIs to theirs. Coming soon.
Now we gotta go off and get that basic Facebook API import support working on PeopleAggregator. Lets see - oh yah - we got a major new release coming up next week - I think we’ll stick it into that!
In addition to geeking out with the Facebook geeks, I met Brad Horowitz who claims I haven’t been emailing him. Yet another victim of an over zealous spam bucket! I hope to be able to get over to the Berkeley Yahoo office and pitch PeopleAggregator. And HOPEFULLY he’ll get in front of Ash Patel as well.
Julia French is working at SocialText - great hire.
Robert Scoble was taping everything and John Furrier was in great spirits. Unfortunately Val Cuningham wasn’t there.
And neither was Asha of France-Telecom/Orange - even though she was one of the sponsors. But sashy Pasquale was!
Tons of other folks there - lots of schmoozing and reining over the whole affair was my favorite kingmaker - Michael Arrington. And his queen Jennifer.