Facebook Gives Access to the Wall to Developers

I saw a pleasant announcement (facebook login required) from Facebook yesterday:

“Applications will very soon have the ability to attach arbitrary FBML content to a user’s wall, which will work in much the same way as attachments currently do for messages. The message action and callback URL for retrieving attachment content (specified on the application settings page) will now also be used to fetch content for a wall post. Refer to the documentation for details on how attachments work. Please note that the fb:message-preview tag will be renamed fb:attachment-preview and the old tag name will soon be deprecated.”

This opens up many possibility for Facebook application developers. Now, no longer does the user have to actually “install” the application to have it added to their profile. Now, you can have other users who have your application installed “post” your application to their friends’ wall for others to play with and use. To me, this is huge, as it allows an even more personal way for people to share their favorite apps with their friends.

One other use I can see for this is in a similar manner to that of the IRC bot. IRC bots sit on an IRC server and listen for particular words or phrases, or commands, and the bot responds appropriately with witty phrases and calculations. One could install this app and have it monitor their wall and post when particular things are said. Great – now I just gave out another business idea – just send me 10% of all your earnings. 🙂 (I really should just put a donation box on here for those that use my ideas)