As f8 has it, FB seems to hate map-reduce
With the new Facebook Connect API, a lot of cool things are possible — updating a user’s profile metadata (such as favorite books or movies), simplification of authentication and simpler permissions, but there has been one major step back that I haven’t heard much about.
It used to be possible (and still is, using the old APIs) to simply request all of a users’ friends, including their favorite movies, music, books, etc. This is powerful: For example, if you are planning a party using FB invites, and Pandora uses the FB Connect API, Pandora could make two calls to get the list of confirmed attendees’, and another to get the attendee’s favorite music — and generate a playlist that features at least some of their favorite tunes.
In the graph API, music is a ‘connection’ between users, and there’s no obvious way to query for connections for a set of users. So instead of two calls, it’s one call to get the list of attendees, and N calls to get the favorite artists for N attendees.
I understand if FB wants to simplify their API to reduce their computational cost, but doing what’s effectively map-reduce makes more sense on the side where the data is available locally, all other things being equal.
I’d love to get their official stance on this, but the FB Dev Forums are effectively down: The FB Connect button doesn’t respond, and a manual registration leads to a “could not open socket” 500 error.
