Facebook has opened up its activity stream through a new API for developers. Now any developer can create new applications incorporating the real-time stream. One of the first apps to take advantage of this new API is Seesmic Desktop , A Twitter client which is now adding your Facebook feed through this API (something Tweetdeck already did in the past through other more restrictive means). Facebook has also created its own desktop notification client to demonstrate what can be built with the API.

Ethan Beard, Facebook’s director of platform marketing, said that the entire feed will be available through a single API call. A developer could recreate the entire Facebook home page if he wanted to or take parts of the feed and remix it to make something more interesting. For starters, I’d expect most Twitter clients to add the Facebook stream as an additional option. On Tweetdeck, for instance, you can read your activity stream, but you cannot respond in-line. The new Facebook Open Stream API is two-way, so it would allow developers to build apps which allow for that two-way communication inside the app.

This is a big deal. It potentially puts Facebook side by side with Twitter in all of these desktop and mobile client applications where a lot of the real-time conversation is happening and lets it compete head-to-head with Twitter. Whichever conversation stream is more interesting will prevail. [full article ]