The Facebook Blog

Two and a half months ago, a few of us were hanging out in the Facebook TV room, laying on the Fatboys and geeking out about how to move forward with the API for the Facebook Platform. We had a beta version that was fully functional, but we kept wishing that the interface were cleaner, more concise, and more consistent. Suddenly it occurred to me – this problem had been solved over 30 years earlier by database developers who came up with SQL – the Structured Query Language. What if we could use the same time-tested interface as the way for developers to access Facebook's data?

This isn't a simple problem – with millions of users and billions of friend connections, photos, tags, etc., Facebook's data doesn't exactly fit into your average database. And, even if it did, we still have to carefully apply all of those complicated privacy rules. Facebook Query Language would have to take those SQL-style queries from developers, figure out what data they're actually looking for, figure out if they're allowed to actually see the data, figure out where the data is stored, and then finally go and get the data to return back to the developer. I knew building FQL would be hard, but that's why I couldn't wait to do it.

In the last couple of weeks, we've slowly rolled out the result of all this work, first in the form of a new version of the Platform's API that uses FQL under the hood, and now with the publicly accessible version of FQL. What does all this mean for a Facebook user? Hopefully FQL will inspire Platform developers to come up with cool new ways of using this data in applications that will be fun and useful to everyone on Facebook. We're excited about the applications that have already been developed using the beta version of the Facebook Platform; now that we're out of beta, we know that the best is yet to come.



Ari works on Facebook Platform, and, as is evidenced by the title FQL, has trouble with creative names and, by extension, creative bylines.