This is an exciting development but won't be meaningful to the average user. Until now, the Facebook API has only permitted gets and queries -- you can pull information out but not put anything in. Automation both ways would make life too easy for the spammers -- we've seen the chaos on MySpace -- so understandably the Facebook API has been quiet on input. While the openness is not full blown, it is still a first step.

Third parties have developed dozens of applications with the get-only API and this move should spur more. A practical application would be one that imports photos from other photo services like Flickr. However, Flickr's own API has been tardy on export functionality, and Facebook's move might cause them to delay it even more.

MySpace continues to offload much photosharing innovation to the widget makers in the add-on ecosystem while Facebook tends its garden exclusively and carefully. However, the MySpace arms length relationship does not allow the deep integrated sharing that users see on Facebook. Photo upload is another sign of their committment to user to user content and social sharing. It would very well prove another competitive advantage that furthers Facebook's stickiness.

12:33am Wednesday, Feb 28
Tonight we added a photo upload suite to Platform, which for the first time allows applications to contribute content directly to Facebook. The suite consists of three new methods:

* photos.addTag
* photos.createAlbum
* photos.upload

These methods will allow the creation of photo exporters and plugins for a wide range of sources, from desktop applications to online photo sharing sites to photo capture devices. All uploaded photos are considered "pending," and must be approved by the user on Facebook before becoming publicly visible.

See photo uploads for a description of how these methods should be used as part of an application's workflow.