Absolutely not. All of your regular Facebook privacy settings apply on the platform and Facebook will never give 3rd parties special access to your information.

If you want to check out some of the cool applications available on the Facebook Platform please go to the Product Directory. Here you will see a list of available applications, like the Facebook Toolbar for Firefox that provides immediate updates on your Facebook friends, messages and pokes. All available applications can be found on this page.

If you have a question about one of the applications available via the Facebook Platform, we strongly recommend that you contact the maker's of the application (i.e. What does this product do? How do I use this product? etc). If your question is about Facebook Platform in general, you can contact us directly by using the form at the bottom of the page.

You can get started with the Facebook Platform by going to the main developer page.

Check out the API Documentation for supported functions and examples. Sign up for an API Key.

You can use the API for commercial and non-commercial applications, deployed on a web site or as a desktop application, as long as you meet our Terms of Service.

Yes, you can use the API on password protected sites as long as you abide by the Facebook API Partner Terms of Service.

The Facebook API can be used to create or enhance both web and desktop applications.

All communication with the Facebook API assumes a UTF-8 encoding.

The API key uniquely identifies your application and is sent on every request made to the Facebook API server. This includes the initial user redirect to the Facebook login page, and subsequent requests to obtain Facebook information related to that user. This is essentially the developer application's unchanging public key. For more information about using such credentials, see API Authentication.

Request counts are measured differently for web based applications than for desktop applications. For web based applications, we currently have a limit of 100,000 due to technical reasons. These limits are applied in a rolling 24- hour window. Since use of desktop applications (and hence your API key) are under the control of the users who have downloaded them, requests from a user of your application are limited at a smaller scale. Make sure that a user of your application wouldn't make more than 15 requests in quick succession. If the application gets near (or over) that threshold, it should wait a few minutes before making any more calls. This policy ensures that the application itself is not limited across all users everywhere, but independently on a per-user basis.

We will return an error value indicating you have exceeded the request limit. For this error code, see the error codes listed for any call in the API Documentation. This will likely be handled differently on the client side depending upon whether you have deployed a desktop or server-based application.

You can write in to developers-help@facebook.com and ask for an increase in the request limit. We will try to accommodate your request as soon as we can.

Sessions last 24 hours. For desktop applications, the session extends with each request. For web applications, you can transparently start a new session by directing the user back to the login page, which if the user is still logged in to Facebook will immediately redirect back to your application.

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. The Facebook API currently supports a REST based protocol; to learn more refer to Wikipedia's definition.

We do plan on supporting SOAP in later releases.

Any content delivered to the outside application can be safely displayed to the user. However, in general, content delievered when using a session key should only be stored until that session key expires. The exceptions to this are user ids and affiliations information. This is detailed further in the accompanying documentation.

If you have any questions about the Terms of Service, please feel free to e-mail them to us. The important thing to understand is that the goals of the Terms of Service are to enable cool, innovative applications that respect the privacy settings of our users. If you are respectful of this idea we will generally be glad to work with you to make sure your application is deemed acceptable.

We do not charge for using the Facebook Platform. It is available for free subject to the Terms of Use.

Please contact us with suggestions or feedback at developers-help@facebook.com.

We have created a group dedicated to developers and users of the Facebook Platform. Here you can have technical discussions, get your questions answered or simply toss around ideas. We encourage you to post to the discussion board but if you need additional help please contact us at developers-help@facebook.com.

To protect our users against spam, we cannot divulge our users contact information. However, you can encourage your users to message their friends as described here. You can also submit your application to the Product Directory.

While we appreciate people's enthusiasm for Facebook, in order to make sure we don't lose our rights to the name, we can't allow users to register domain names that incorporate the word "face" or any variations of "face" (like "faacebook", "facbook", "face[xxx]" or "[xxx]face", for example). The following paragraph applies to application names only, not domains. The one exception is that you can use the word "Facebook" in a purely descriptive way to accurately identify the Facebook site or features of the Facebook site. For instance, "Facebook Friend Finder" would be OK as a name for an application that allowed you to find your Facebook friends, because the name accurately describes what the application does; however "FaceFriend" would not be OK, because it does not describe what the application does. If you do use the word "Facebook" in a descriptive way, you must include an (R) symbol next to the word "Facebook" and post the following notice on each page where you use the name: "Facebook" is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc. All rights reserved.