Facebook *is* opening up
And it's starting to happen right now, today in fact. — I reported earlier on a new feed in Facebook, allowing notifications to be visible outside the wall. — It's getting reallll interesting — I've found some more RSS feeds in Facebook's UI. — 1. Friends Status Updates.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands mid-run for Facebook: the September 2006 facelift rebuilt the site around feeds, and within days of this report the company had put a preliminary Data Store API into closed beta on its developer wiki (Haiping Zhao, August 10) while its main index page source leaked to a blog called Facebook Secrets (August 12). Winer finding RSS feeds — including Friends Status Updates — sitting in the UI extends that same arc from internal features to externally readable data.
TechCrunch's same-day pickup ('Facebook Opens Up Their Data Feeds') shows the developer press treating this as a data-access story, not a UI tweak, against a backdrop where Facebook had just declined multi-billion-dollar sale whispers and was widely reported to be preparing for an IPO.
First-order effects
- Facebook activity becomes readable outside facebook.com for the first time via RSS — any feed reader or third-party aggregator can now pull friends' status updates and notifications without logging in.
Second-order effects
- Developers already probing the closed-beta Data Store API gain a second, zero-auth integration surface, making Facebook the default backend for outside mashups; rivals' walled gardens face pressure to expose equivalent feeds or cede developer mindshare.
Third-order effects
- If feeds keep escaping the wall, distribution shifts from destination sites to syndicated streams — marketing inside feeds (already being dubbed News Feed Optimization) compounds as the channel that decides what content reaches users.
The trend: Social networks are evolving from closed destinations into data platforms whose value flows through machine-readable feeds rather than pageviews.