Facebook has frequently been criticized for not allowing info out of the facebook eco-system for developers. Well it now looks like Facebook is going to change that starting today. You can see what they are saying below in 2 different blog posts from the facebook team. It will be interesting to see how websites & services incorporate this new data portability. To say that the facebook stream is going to become a raging river and flow across tens of thousands of websites and services is an understatement.

Interact with Your Stream Anywhere by Justin Bishop
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=79988352130

When you want to stay updated with your friends and other connections on Facebook, you can log into your home page to see a running timeline, or stream, of the information they’re sharing. The more they share, the more you see in the stream and the more you learn about your connections. Starting today, you have the option to access that same stream outside of Facebook.com.

Now, you’ll be able to view your stream and publish information into it from places you never could before — like your desktop computer or your mobile phone. Your stream will appear just as it does on Facebook.com and maintain the same privacy settings. We believe that the ability to see more and more of what is happening around you will lead to greater openness and transparency.

To make this work, we released new technology for developers so they can offer this option to you on other websites and applications. We work closely with third-party developers to enable intriguing and meaningful experiences both on and off Facebook.com. Since we launched Facebook Platform in 2007, developers have created 10s of thousands of applications to help you connect and share with your friends in interesting ways — whether by playing a social game, discovering new books or creating group greeting cards.

Last year, we announced Facebook Connect to make it easy for you to take your online identity with you across the Web and share what you do online with your friends back on Facebook by publishing your actions to the stream. Today’s announcement is an extension of that by making it easy for you to interact with your stream from anywhere.

We’ve already worked with a few developers to build some of these new experiences for you to try out, and we’ve created one ourselves, as well. Beginning later today, you’ll be able to find these and future implementations in the Facebook Application Directory under “For Your Desktop.”

For instance, you’ll be able to install Facebook Desktop for AIR and connect using your Facebook account.

Then, you’ll receive two prompts: the first to give permission for the application to access your News Feed and Wall and the second to give permission to publish posts and comments.

>From there, you’ll be able to interact with your stream just as you would on Facebook but directly from your desktop rather than through a browser. You’ll be able to do all the same things you would normally do on Facebook, including view your friends’ content and publish information through the Composer. You can even “Like” and comment on your friends’ stories directly from your desktop.

Be sure to also check out Seesmic’s desktop application, which includes your stream from Facebook and adds feeds from other websites, too.

In the coming months, you’ll be able to interact with your stream on even more websites and through more applications, in ways we’re only beginning to imagine.

Facebooks Developer blog post:

The Facebook Open Stream API By Ray C. He
http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=225

Today we are excited to announce an unprecedented step toward greater openness through Facebook Platform. For the first time, we’re opening the core Facebook product experience — the stream — with the new Facebook Open Stream API.

The home page design centralizes the stream of information that tells you what’s going on right now in the world around you. With the Facebook Open Stream API users will be able to use applications to read and interact with their stream. As a Facebook developer you’ll also be able to access the posts you’ve published into the stream and display them in your application, whether it’s on a mobile device, Web site or desktop.

To enable developers to access the stream, we’ve built the Facebook Open Stream API to include the emerging Activity Streams standard. Over the last several months, we’ve been collaborating with the community, hosting meetups at Facebook headquarters, and speaking at industry events about Activity Streams and the open stack. We think that working alongside our peers to create an open standard for accessing and consuming streams is the future. We’ll continue to make contributions to the standards community and related technologies and are happy to be one of the first companies to implement Activity Streams at scale.

In addition to the Activity Streams interface, the Open Stream API includes robust new APIs called stream.get and stream.publish and new FQL tables that enable you to directly access the stream. With these new methods, you can access the stream on behalf of a user and then filter, remix, and display the stream back to that user however you choose, wherever you choose, in the manner most relevant for the user experience. Other new API methods will allow users to both publish into the stream and to add comments and “likes” to posts in the stream.

Consistent with our previous steps toward greater openness, we believe users must have full control and choice and that’s exactly how we’ve designed Facebook Platform and the Open Stream API. All Facebook Platform terms governing data use apply and an application or Facebook Connect site can only access a user’s view of the stream if the user gives the application permission.

To get things started we’ve worked alongside a few beta partners to test the Facebook Open Stream API. For example, Seesmic Desktop is now a full-featured client for the stream and Adobe has created a simple stream Notifier using the AIR development framework.

In addition, we’ve created a sample client application which includes all of the APIs we’ve released today on top of Adobe’s AIR development platform. The code is available in our public repository.

You can get started by reading the documentation. Please share your comments and feedback in the Developer Forum.

We can’t wait to see the amazing new experiences you build for the more than 200 million Facebook users. You can see what they are also saying over on Techcrunch

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