The next twitter API method: account creation
Disclaimer: This post is entirely speculative. It is also 100% true.
I’ve been playing with Facebook’s new like button recently (you can find it fading in at the bottom of the http://drop.io homepage). As you probably know, with these new iframe-powered like buttons you can ‘like’ drop.io directly from our site, without interacting with Facebook connect pop-ups (if you’re logged in to fb), and the message that ‘you like drop.io on drop.io’ (there are still some kinks) will float by on your facebook wall. This is analogous to the @anywhere system that Twitter is/will be rolling out, with the ability to tweet and retweet from 3rd party contexts.
The big thing about ‘liking’ that you might not realize (though it is carried over from the days of being a fan of something on facebook) is that the entity that you like (such as drop.io, but that entity could be a specific product, restaurant, actor, etc.) gains the permission and ability to publish content directly into your facebook stream. In other words, every entity in the facebook ecosystem (they call it the Open Graph) is a distribution hub, and when you like it, you subscribe to the published stream from that entity. The rub? In Twitter terms, the like button is a retweet button AND a follow button! Facebook brilliantly renamed “become a fan” and merged that action into the more casual “like”, which will very likely spur people to subscribe to these distribution hubs without totally realizing what is going on.
“So what?”, I hear you cry. ”Twitter’s @anywhere let’s you follow people too!” And it does/will. (To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure if it’s released yet, and I’m a bit too lazy this morning to go check. Someone will let me know in the comments). But the one crucial new aspect of the Facebook system (also not fully appreciated) is that you can turn any page into an Open[ish] Graph object by throwing on a few meta tags into the header and having a like button on the page. So Yelp’s hundreds of thousands of restaurants can each have a like button their page, and we now know that each one of those restaurant pages will then become a functioning distribution hub, able to send notices to followers/likers/subscribees! And that’s the big takeaway from the new system. Before, there was no programmatic way to elegantly set up a distribution hub on Facebook, but now it’s a few lines (<10) of code in a template.
And now back to the headline. This is huge news: a game changer in the distribution space, and Twitter will respond with the analogous move in their system and allow the creation of accounts via the API. Fred Wilson has been hinting at this as the final step in implementing a fully writable API, but with this latest move by Facebook the clock is ticking for Twitter to respond.
