Today at its f8 developer conference, Facebook announced the introduction of four APIs designed to help media organizations seamlessly integrate Facebook content and data into their broadcasts and reporting. The announcement comes a week after Facebook introduced FB Newswire, a tool designed to help journalists publicly shared posts into their reporting.
The APIs now available to media companies are: Trending, Topic Insights, Topic Feed, and Hashtag Counter. Via Facebook, here’s a summary of each:
Trending
AdvertisementThe Trending API exposes a list of depersonalized trends that people are currently talking about on Facebook.
Topic Insights
The Topic Insights API provides aggregate anonymized insights about people mentioning a certain topic.
Topic Feed
The Topic Feed API lets you search for any topic and see a ranked feed of public posts about that topic.
Hashtag Counter
The Hashtag Counter API lets you count the number of times a specific hashtag has been used within a certain timeframe.
These new APIs are designed for developers like those in the Public Content Solutions program (announced last month), or in-house teams at media companies; Facebook has been providing an email address – contentsolutions@fb.com – for those wanting to develop products with the new APIs.
Even more than the initial introduction of Trending Topics, the standalone app – ‘Paper,’ and FB Newswire, these 4 APIs have significant social TV implications.
It has become commonplace to hear news and sports announcers report on whether an event is trending on Twitter. Jimmy Fallon, for example, announces that his ‘Late Night Hashtags’ are often trending on Twitter within 20 minutes of being introduced. Facebook wants to become more part of this conversation, and we will closely follow whether it is successful.