Yesterday I spent a few hours learning how to program an application that can access Facebook information. I was able to use the Facebook Development Toolkit (FDK) for Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition. 

Since I teach a course in intro programming in Visual Basic, the addition of tools for Facebook got me very interested. I'm more or less a teacher first and a programmer second, so I am by no mean hard core "developer" but after a few hours I was able to get some basic information out of my Facebook account.

The FDK for Visual has a small number of tools including FriendList, PhotoAlbum and UserProfile components, of which I've just started using the FriendList component to download my list of Friends.

After further fiddling, I was able to store the names of my friends in a listbox, count them and also count the number of males and females! Pretty simple stuff but you can see how this can be the start of an application to perform statistical analysis about the kinds of people you know. 

More directly, it is a great way to teach computer programming basics to a group of primarily 19 year olds!

Anyone familiar with Facebook will realize that a "Facebook Application" is a small add-on that you can use to add to your profile. That is a "web application" and what I've created was a desktop application.

You can create web applications in Ruby, Python, Java and other languages and my next step will be to figure out how to write a web application. In the mean time, in the coming weeks I'll be covering how to create MS Access tables in Visual Basic, so I might as well use them to store Facebook information! 

Visit: http://developer.facebook.com/ for more details.
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