ThomAllenWeblog

This is a very exciting addition to the Facebook developer platform. One major application I’m writing will definitely take advantage of these new features, specifically SMS. I use Facebook via my mobile device most of the time. I’m exciting this new addition to the API will bring richer applications to market.

Reading more about the SMS feature of the API it seems there is a throttle on the number of messages that can be sent out. That makes sense seeing how there is a cost to send out messages. However, I can also see this is as a drawback if you are writing an application and need to send out notifications each time an action occurs.

There seems to be 3 main parts of the SMS API.

1. User opt-in
2. Design features
3. User opt-out

One really cool option is a user can interact with an application via SMS. I assume this means I can send commands back to an application and have it perform some type of function. It will remain to be seen if this can be a feature that is usable or not.

The next part of the API is access to the profile and canvas areas. This gives mobile developers the ability to make mobile applications act more like the full web based version. And if I’m not mistaken, you can write one application that can be used via the web or on a mobile device. That is very cool.

As a budding Facebook application developer I hope to take advantage of these features. I hope there is more to come regarding the mobile API.

Link to the Facebook Platform for Mobile.