Inside Facebook

Developers looking for new ways to get exposure on the Facebook profile page should take note: Facebook this week has begun showing the application used to update users’ Facebook status when they do so through Facebook Platform applications. While the application used to update Facebook status is not linked from the News Feed, it is displayed on the top of the profile page in small text.

Services which integrate with Facebook via the Platform like Twitter, Ping.fm, and the Facebook Toolbar for Firefox take advantage of Facebook’s status update API to enable users to publish to Facebook from outside the site.

The status update functionality can be extended by any Facebook application, which could be a way to get traffic to your application. However, the source link leads to the application’s About page, and the destination URL is not customizable by the developer.

Update: Some Facebook developers are already asking Facebook to enhance to the setStatus feature. For example, see Nisan Gabbay’s Bugzilla request to add basic FBML tags to setStatus here.