When the Facebook Data Store API was released several months ago, there was some interesting analysis and general enthusiasm. I for one was pretty psyched as I felt that each time Facebook extended their API, they were creating opportunities for developers to “change the game” by taking advantage of the new functionality. I was also craving the ability to rapidly develop data services for my app that wouldn’t require any meetings, reviews, roadmaps, resources or approvals.

I sat down to actually work with the Data Store API three weeks ago, and thought that for sure by now there would be plenty of people using it and putting up examples of how easy it was for them on the web. Alas, my web searches were turning up only those same entries that were all written in August. I couldn’t find any practical examples from any one who was actually using it. One of the last entries on the Data Store API discussion page reads, “Good in theory, but not in practice”.

We’re clearly still in the early stages for the API. There are no tools that make it easy to use and working with associations may be a different approach for many people. But once you get your head around it, I actually found it was quite simple to create my data objects using the API Test Console. With the data model in place, it’s easy to post data to from PHP or Flash and you can query your custom tables using FQL. Pretty sweet actually. For the Music Blogs application, this has made a huge impact.

Before using the Data Store API, I was using the Flash Shared Object to save a list of music blogs each user had recently listened to or added as a favorite. This was stored on the users machines which meant it was different from one computer to the next, and there was no way that I could look at or analyze any of the information. It seemed like really interesting data so this was pretty annoying.

This week we went live with an updated version of Music Blogs which now uses the Facebook API for all its storage needs. The change has opened up a whole new social dimension to the application. Users can now see the Top 10 most popular blogs on Facebook, they can browse what their friends have been listening to and they can even read the music blog directly within the app while listening to the music. Thank you Facebook Data Store API. Thank you very much.

Music Blogs

Popularity: 63% [?]