If any of you attended last years Dreamforce session by Sandeep Bhanot and Jeff Douglas, titled Leveraging Public Social Networksyou would have had a sneak peek at the freshly rewritten Facebook toolkit. I'm excited to announce that the toolkit is now available.

The Getting Started Guide contains all the details on how to use the toolkit. The first thing you will notice is that the toolkit is still in Beta. The reason for this is the toolkit uses the new Facebook Graph APIs which return JSON. The current JSON parser we are using is not as efficient as we would like, but this is on the roadmap to improve. In addition, the toolkit only supports read-only access (pulling data from Facebook). The toolkit is designed in a way in which we can add write access pretty quickly, and it is on my todo list. Of course if someone in the community wants to help, all the code is in GitHub — fork away I say!

As you read through the getting started article, and if you used the previous version of the toolkit, you will hopefully see that we spent a decent amount of time rethinking what a good toolkit looks like: there are sample pages, point and click configuration for things like access tokens, and even new Visualforce components for facebook images, likes and recommendations.

I guess there is not much more to say. If you find the toolkit useful, please leave a comment and share what you have built!