Everybody complains about Facebooks privacy settings and ambiguity, but well, from a developer stand point I think it’s actually rather fun. I have recently just been playing around with the graph API in an attempt to make some Facebook Apps. The main part I was looking at was Facebook Places and peoples checkins. I was actually initially shocked at how easily available the data was, well once I allowed my application access my friends locational data (checkins). From what I could find out, that data wasn’t easily visualized by Facebook. Sure you could go to a places page and see what friends have checked in there or see them check in on your news stream but that was about it.

This is where I just took the longitudinal  and latitudinal data from Facebook and just used it with the Google Maps api to plot points as to where a specific person has checked in. Here’s a sample screenshot:

To me it’s really cool what you can do with the data that’s available. I may try and make a different app than what I was thinking about previously to use this map data in relation to a friend or friends and allow you to comment on their checkins and more importantly, question them as to why they were in the pub on June 29th without you??
Also have been doing a little of filming and playing around with my portfolio website. During this time I got a little bored and took a *brilliant photo of myself. (*Note: brilliance is subjective)

Tags: facebook, Google Maps API