Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications which a programmer writing an application program can make requests of the operating system or another application. The Facebook API is a platform for building applications that are available to the members of the social network of Facebook. The API allows applications to use the social connections and profile information to make applications more involving and to publish activities to the news feed and profile pages of Facebook, subject to individual user’s privacy settings. With the API, users can add social context to their applications by utilizing profile, friend, Page, group, photo, and event data. The API uses Restful protocol and responses are localized and in XML format. The Facebook API allows web developers to create Facebook applications and access Facebook data from other applications. The main features of the Facebook API are to learn about the API–specific languages FQL and FBML. And FBML (Facebook Markup Language) is Facebook’s version of HTML, the language that web pages are written in. Knowledge of HTML is needed to utilize the functionality of the Static FBML application. This particular application, which was created by Facebook and can be added to any pages, allows to create a “web page” within a tab or box that can attach to a webpage.
