We're really excited to be launching the Apigee Facebook API Console today - a free tool that allows Facebook developers to easily learn, debug, interact with and develop on the Graph API. Here's a quick demo:

The console makes working with the Facebook API easier, faster, more social. We think of it as a "view source" or browser for the Graph API—it lets you easily send and review requests and responses, learn the structure quickly, share what you are seeing with a "share" feature, and "crawl" the graph by jumping from object ID to object ID. It shows you what your program will see… and what other programs can see about you.

There are a few features we added that make working with the console especially delightful. We support Facebook's implementation of the OAuth 2.0 draft specification, which means you can log in to the console with your Facebook credentials, or you can stay unauthenticated to see what information the API makes public. We also implemented an "AwesomeBar" (thanks Firefox!) which lets you start typing a request, method or object—it will make suggestions and autocomplete for you! The Graph API also has a few unique features, including file attachment and customer header parameters, and we let you view and interact with those too.

Facebook has over a million developers and hundreds of thousands of applications in its ecosystem, a powerful example of the innovation and growth that APIs can fuel. We have lots of Facebook developers on our platform and wanted to make something that could help them out—combined with our Twitter API console, we now support two of the top social platforms in the world.

And don't forget that you can also use us to get API analytics, like response time, usage, geolocation, and error rates, for your Facebook apps. You can sign up at app.apigee.com/sign_up. Another tool you might find helpful is our API Debugger, which you can use with any API to record and review requests and responses and dig into errors. You can access the debugger from your Apigee log-in page.

Check it out and let us know what you think, and of course, if you have any problems or suggestions, just drop us an @apigee on Twitter or in our support community.

Because Apigee is a tool used by people who build things on top of APIs, we get to see a lot of cool mashups and tools — Flickr Photosets is one of them, built using the Flickr and Facebook APIs proxied through Apigee.

It's easy to see why this app has so many fans. It's the fastest and most intuitive Flickr app we've seen on Facebook. You can also view and share your comments.  And it's an impressive example of how community can make an app better — with both open source code available for any facebook developer and a rich community discussion forum for users to suggest improvements.

Brad Dougherty, the app developer, uses Apigee to monitor usage, errors, and response time from the Flickr API. We appreciate Brad's great feedback such as making it easy to identify (and rate limit) different URLs by API method calls specified by parameters - we've heard that across a few users, and we are working on it. We asked Brad for his comments on working with Apigee and for what he's learned through this project.

Although my app hasn't had any downtime since I started using Apigee, it's a great way to monitor that calls to the Flickr API are actually working, something I haven't been able to see in the past. The biggest lesson I've learned from this app is that it can be very taxing to keep up with the changes in Facebook's API. It's a battle to keep adding new features when you keep having to change things to keep up-to-date with Facebook.

We spotted a great Facebook app in the wild.

Bird.im's Facebook app - apps.facebook.com/birdwatching - brings birdwatchers together to share and discuss their latest finds. 

This is a very well designed and full featured app - enabling sharing of bird photos, locations, discussions and connecting passionate enthusiasts with similar interests.   The Facebook platform at it's best.

The Birdwatching Facebook app provides an API for Facebook to consume when the user performs 'one-click' AJAX actions such as adding a bird, a country, or a photo for a spotting.  This streamlines entry creation by offering an alternative over a simple form and directly improves user engagement as users create and share more entries.   In the future, an iPhone app that enables entries from the field will also consume this API.

Hugo and the bird.im team (@birdim) use Apigee to measure API response rates and errors.  (see how Apigee calculates API response rates and API error rates in previous entries).

Thanks to Hugo for all the great feedback on our Apigee Feedback forum!