Facebook *is* opening up

Tuesday, August 14, 2007 by Dave Winer.

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. Look for the subscription link in the lower right corner.  

2. Friends Posted Items. Again, look in the lower right corner. 

These are new, and I'm pretty sure more are coming. 

Of course the big question is How Far Will They Go? 

Do you all think that the apps we're building on top of Twitter will be able to run on the Facebook platform? I think there are a lot more users "over there." (I'm still very much centered in TwitterLand as I'm sure is obvious to anyone who's rooted in FaceBook.) 

TechCrunch coverage of this story. 

Jeff Sandquist: "I suspect this will allow me to send my Facebook status updates to Twitter." 

Paul Thompson: "The 'friends status updates' feed has been available for a while now." 

Geekspeaker says RSS may be the new HTML. 

Many people report (see above, and on TechCrunch) the Facebook feeds are not new. Maybe so, but... If they're not new, their significance hasn’t penetrated the thinking in the tech community. According to convention wisdom, Facebook was, until today, considered a sandbox, a walled garden, a silo. Now that we know that the feeds are being implemented (many are still needed to make it really open) it's possible for Facebook-generated data to percolate into other Internet applications. As Fred Wilson has wisely pointed out, there is no winner-take-all outcome possible, and closed sandboxes just encourage route-arounds, so what Facebook is doing is smart and necessary. (Wilson is a backer of Twitter.)