Douglas Purdy

At the NOLA airport preparing to move on to the next leg of the OData Roadshow after TechEd North Amercia 2010.

I enjoyed the conference, particularly doing the keynote with Bob Muglia and the “Open Data for the Open Web” session with Jonathan Carter.

One of the things that we announced in our session was some work that we have been doing with Facebook:  the Insights OData Service.

Facebook Insights provides FB application developers and page authors access to a wealth of information about how FB users interact with their applications and pages.

We started working with Facebook just before F8 on an implementation that would bring this dataset into the OData ecosystem.

Our primary goal is to make this information accessible in a first class way within Microsoft’s BI tools, like Excel.

TechEd seemed like a good place to talk about our progress to date.

The service is still in “preview” mode, as we are still adding features and we are likely to change the URL, etc.

Nevertheless, if you have a Facebook application or page, I encourage you to check it out.