For the past month or so, we've been working on Facebook Connect integration with our site, and now it's finally available for you to try out. It's a great way for users to be able to mix the powerful web channel surfing experience on ffwd with the unique social context that Facebook provides.

This first release includes the following features:

- Sign up or log in to your account on ffwd using your Facebook account.

- Import your favorite shows and interests from Facebook directly into your ffwd channel.

- View or search for your Facebook friends on ffwd using their Facebook identities.

- Post videos directly to your Facebook profile page when sharing or saving a video on ffwd.

We'll continue to work on improving the Facebook user experience on our site in the coming months, so please let us know what else you'd like to see!

Today, we are announcing the release of an early beta version of our API tools. These tools will provide you ways of connecting to and accessing data from your ffwd profile when building your own API widgets and applications.

To request a Developer API key or view the documentation, visit our Developer Site.

Please note that you will need a valid beta account to request an API key.

We've started taking an initial look at building out some of our services for mobile devices. Spent some time last week evaluating iPhone application development, and though it supports web standards apps, the really nice apps are going to require customized development with a real Cocoa-based SDK (last word is that it won't be shipping until Spring 2008). It seems that iPhone as a development environment is already encumbered by Apple's insistence on being proprietary and somewhat close-minded.

Google's newly announced Android OS, on the other hand, is a true open source project, and they've even gone so far as to develop their own virtual machine in order to circumvent Sun's restrictions on applications developed with the JME. It also supports the latest whiz-bang mobile media and networking features right out of the box, and has improved on Sun's original Java mobile class implementation.

So I guess the real question for us is, will developers out there adapt Android over iPhone? It certainly seems likely that they will, given Google's track record and the fact that open software leads to open innovation.

It's almost a week until we're supposed to debut our little baby to the world, and folks are starting to get nervous. But we've been churning out code for more than two months now, going through an architecture redesign both on the software and system level. One of the things we wanted to do this round was to address issues of scalability. So for the next several posts, I'll try to discuss some of the things we've tried to accomplish in this area.

One of the first things we took a look at was offloading all our images to AmazonS3, but after doing some benchmarks on it, it seemed to be pretty slow at serving up images. Compared to having them hosted locally, the load times were about doubled. Ouch! We really don't have a lot of images in our pages, because a lot of the design is pure CSS, but in certain cases we need to load a bunch of images at the same time, as is the case for our shows and channels picker. So for now we're going to stick with our own local hosts for these, and start evaluating migrating over to a CDN like MirrorImage or Limelight in a few weeks.

However, AmazonS3 is not something to just be disregarded completely, and for what it is, it works quite nicely as a cheap, reliable storage system. Our hosting company doesn't currently support mounting shared SAN storage, so until then, we'll be using S3 to store all of our user-uploaded images. This seemed to be a more reliable alternative than using some kind of rsync script on the server side to synchronize uploads between our load-balance web servers. All we have to worry about is just making sure the URLs are pointing to the right location on Amazon's servers, and we're good to go.

I spent some time integrating S3 into our PHP uploader built in CakePHP, and for all intensive purposes, it was pretty simple, thanks to another open source library out there called PHP-AWS, which provides PHP5 classes for connecting to all of Amazon's web services. Everything is well documented and easy to integrate, and we were able to get something up and running within a day. I'll try to follow up on this with another post in a few weeks, to let you know how everything turns out.