“Something is going on with Facebook” commented John Kirriemuir yesterday in response to my “Death Of Email Debate Continues in Facebook” post.
Well he was right. A post published in a Guardian blog today entitled “Why Facebook is the new Apple” links to the announcement of Facebook’s F8 platform - a development which lets users embed other services inside their pages in Facebook.
The Facebook Developer’s site states that “The Facebook Platform is a standards-based web service with methods for accessing and contributing Facebook data. We’ve made the methods as easy to understand as possible, and included full documentation to help you learn more“.
I suspected something was happening to Facebook when I viewed ajcann’s Facebook page yesterday and noticed that it contained an embedded video clip (a teaching clip about some aspect of microbiology). So I added the Splashcast application to my Facebook account (this has only been available since 25 May, incidentally). I also noticed a whole range of additional applications which are available, so I added my del.icio.us feed and the Scribd repository service, as illustrated below.
What does this provide us with? Well I think we can regard Facebook as now providing an operating system environment which can provide access to a whole host of applications to support teaching and learning :-) And it’s popular with students - and a lot cheaper than Blackboard! Good news then?
