The famous and my favorite lifestreaming service, FriendFeed, has announced the launch of its API (Application Programing Interface).  FriendFeed has been making lots of announcements these days like the integration of search and the ability to respond to Twitter messages from FriendFeed itself.

With the API, developers will be able to extend and integrate the FriendFeed service and user’s data like friends, shared items, recommendations and activities in their own applications.  The other aspect which FriendFeed has taken care of is users’ data security by creating Remote Key for every user.  So the users will not be required to give their FriendFeed password while using any third-party application.

I can foresee a lot of interesting and useful web, mobile as wells as desktop applications being built on top of FriendFeed API.  An example from their own blog is an iPhone application providing the ability to easily publish your photos to FriendFeed.  Marshall Kirkpatrick from Read Write Web wants to see a FriendFeed and Imeem mashup which can produce a streaming radio station based on friends favorite music tracks.

I think the purpose of any API is to have the developers create innovative and useful applications which either the company cannot think of or does not have resources to do so.  The other obvious purpose is to grow the service virally.  However, most of the times, the APIs are being used for just representing the data in a nice interface or providing the ability to do the same things which could have been done on the site itself.  I can think of numerous Twitter apps which are doing this.  As a user I would like to see some real innovative applications like product or service recommendations,  built on the FriendFeed API and not just a Google map of user’s shared items.

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