Facebook: Data Grows Up (BA ch 6)

The whole time I was reading the chapter on Facebook integration I kept thinking to myself, "Man ... what is something really cool that I could write to use these APIs?" Then I started to think about the business drivers Facebook was being presented with that drove them to develop the web service interface, FQL, FBML/FBJS. Obviously there is a desire for third party applications to be able to tap into the Facebook data as it can be extremely valuable for marketing purposes. However, Facebook has to figure out how to meet that demand but still keep the data "under wraps" as it is one of their core assets. This is what I think drove the decision of FBML/FBJS as it gave Facebook a way to allow third-party applications access to the data that they wanted without giving them access to the data itself.

Personally, I am not a fan when more and more competing standards or frameworks are introduced to accomplish the same task. For example, did Facebook really need to go as far as designing another HTML and JavaScript variant for providing a safe sandbox for these third-party applications? Could they simply have used HTML and JavaScript as they exist, but do some strict parsing before presentation to end users? I'm not sure in this case...