One of Twitter’s long-time strengths compared to Facebook, has been the cadre of third-party applications available for accessing the service from desktop and mobile devices. Applications such as Tweetie, Twhirl and TweetDeck use Twitter’s application programming interface, or API, to access the service and provide a richer user experience than can be had on Twitter’s homepage, while other applications take the stream of data from users’ accounts and mash it up in all sorts of creative ways. It’s been one of Twitter’s great competitive advantages in the battle for eyeballs, but all that changes now if Facebook has its way.
On Monday, Facebook announced via its blog the Open Stream API, which allows developers to write programs that take full advantage of everything Facebook knows about your friends. Tom’s eating an orange? You’ll know right from your desktop. Jen uploaded pictures from her vacation. You’ll know — on your desktop.
It should be noted that Facebook’s old API already gave developers access to the short, Twitter-like status updates that Facebook has tried to make central to the services in the past few months. What this announcement means is anything you can see in your Facebook newsfeed (photos, videos, updates from third-party applications, etc.) can now be included in a desktop application. It’s a full frontal attack on Twitter and its recent spike in popularity, and it has huge implications for marketers trying to reach Facebook’s more than 200 million active users.
On Twitter, a tweet is a tweet is a tweet; it doesn’t matter if it’s from your best friend, your favorite pizza place or your aunt Mildred. But Facebook knows significantly more about who is behind each of its many user accounts. A brand could pay to make its messages pop up bigger and stick longer on your screen than messages from your friends. That’s just one example, but history has shown that when data are open, people find creative ways to use it.
Facebook surely hopes the applications developers create with the new open spigot of information will be enough to keep users from defecting to the next cool thing; it’s a smart move, for sure.
If Facebook users change their habits to access the service from a desktop application instead of a browser the way many Twitter users do remains to be seen. Regardless, Facebook will be playing a game of catch up: The first I heard of Open Stream, after all, was Sunday afternoon, sitting in a coffee shop, reading the updates from Twitter on my desktop.