Facebook to open up its Platform as OpenSource?

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch says

Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us.

In his post from this tuesday, may 27th he further informs that

Bebo already licenses the Facebook Platform, which allows third parties to make their Facebook applications work on Bebo, too. With the new announcement, social networks won’t need to go through the hassle of doing a deal with Facebook. They’ll simply map their existing APIs to Facebook Platform (which isn’t trivial) and go. Expect to see the four major technical pieces of Facebook Platform - FMBL (markup language), FQL (query language), FJS (Javascript library) and the Facebook API to be open sourced and made available to anyone.

This is clearly the answer to fight Google-promoted OpenSocial initiative. We'll see if this will be a similar war as it was deliberated in the mid-late 90's when Microsoft -Behind Facebook as shareholder as you may know - introduced Internet explorer to fight the Netscape Web browser. what seems to be clear that the leading Social Network Services MySpace and Facebook will go on fighting for leadership.

The importance of OpenSocial ad OpenID for Social Networks Services Marketers

Dear fellow readers,

I was wondering if you all as Marketers dealing with how to best and most efficiently promote your products and services on the Internet, are aware about the significance of the OpenSocial Standard initiative mainly driven by Google, MySpace and Yahoo! and many other Social Network Services providers such as hi5, bebo, orkut, Linkedin and Xing to name just some of them.

Please note the following URL for future references on OpenSocial. It is the official OpenSocial Website where you can find all companies that support today or will support in a near future OpenSocial. http://www.opensocial.org.



Standards such as HTML, PDF, XML and SWF helped Internet in the beginning and until today to become so popular and powerful changing the way people communicate and distribute products and services today in question of seconds from Berlin to Sidney or Ulan Bator to Rio de Janeiro.


So will do OpenSocial for all these revolutionary Social Network Services Platforms that are popping up since almost three years in the Internet simplifying and standardising issues regarding user identification - Another initiative regarding that issue is OpenID closely related to the OpenSocial initiative- , portability of user profile information, community tools, services and applications. Many important basic elements have still to be defined regarding the integration of the almost one hundred existing Social Network Services Platforms committed to implement OpenSocial. But as in the past - I is just a question of time!

We at sixjumps have joined OpenSocial to get involved into the definition of the OpenSocial Foundation.

OpenID is having a tremendous success and gives you as a user the possibility to login with the same username and password at any Website or Webservice such as Social Network Services Platforms. This addresses one of the biggest problems we have up to date: Identity management. I actually hold 20+ accounts on all kind of Internet Services Platforms and would be too glad to see that all these sites would work with OpenID.



So maybe as a Marketing professional you understood: This makes the end users life a lot easier and jumping from one into another website or Social Network Service much faster and this makes the whole Internet much more useful and attractive to all of us. More users = More audience = Better business!

No future for walled Gardens - MySpace launches ‘Data Availability’ initiative

Just one day after my birthday - May 8th - a press release on Business wire hammered the Social Networks services Provider market:

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--MySpace, the world’s most popular social network, alongside Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter, today announced the launch of the MySpace ‘Data Availability’ initiative, a ground-breaking offering to empower the global MySpace community to share their public profile data to websites of their choice throughout the Internet. Today’s announcement throws open the doors to traditionally closed networks by putting users in the driver’s seat of their data and Web identity. The launch of the Data Availability initiative marks the first time that a social Website has enabled its community to dynamically share public profile information with other sites.

It didn't take more than 2 days for facebook to answer on this MySpace, Yahoo, Photobucket and Twitter initiative to present plans for Data Portability in a near future.

RedWriteWeb say on their blog about Facebooks initiative the following:

Facebook says they're "committed to enabling people to communicate and stay connected wherever they go" and looks to execute on this statement with Facebook Connect. The Facebook Connect platform will essentially be a new version of their API that was released back in May 2007. The new API will give developers the opportunity to develop tools that will allow users to port their connections, privacy settings, and networks from their Facebook account to other third party websites. Essentially, third party websites will have access to features that have only been available to third party applications on Facebook itself.
Digg looks like it will be the first launch partner for the platform.

This will doubtless push social Networks usage even more and make them more attractive to end users.

facebook, flickr, digg and flock Webby Award winners 2008

Facebook:
Social Networking Webby People’s Choice Winner

flickr:
Best Practices Webby Award Winner
Community Webby Award Winner
Community Webby People’s Choice Winner

digg:
Best Practices Webby People’s Choice Winner

flock:
Social Networking Webby Award Winner

More on the offcial Webby Awards Website here

Hi5 and MySpace now operative with OpenSocial

Good news for Application Developers for Social Network Services as both MySpace and Hi5 are now ready to receive thousands of applications based on OpenSocial.

Almost at the same time both Social Network Services Platforms are ready.

Hi5 says on its internal Blog on april 4 the following:

"hi5 Platform Launch 100% Complete! [By Lou Moore on April 4, 2008 6:52 PM ]

As of last night, the hi5 Platform release has been rolled out to 100% of our 80+ million registered members across the globe. We're very excited to have been able to complete the rollout process in such a short period of time. We've also been busy reviewing and approving new applications as they are submitted, and are happy to report our gallery now boasts 149 applications (for comparison, we started with 65 at launch on Monday)!

To help spread your apps, we'll be adding a homepage and profile promotion for the Application Gallery starting Monday, and enabling email notifications Monday as well. Let us know if you have any questions about how to leverage our numerous viral channels for promoting your apps – we love all the new ways our users can enjoy hi5 with your apps!

Thanks again to all the developers that have helped make this launch a success. We're looking forward to a huge week next week for applications on hi5, as well as rolling out full access to our wiki and bug tracker, and getting started on hi5 Platform v2!

For more information on Hi5 check their Blog here

MySpace took only three weeks more to say the same on April 25:

MySpace Application Gallery, MySpace’s app directory which launched in limited beta back in March, is now fully live and open to the public. The MySpace application gallery allows users to browse applications and integrate them into their MySpace page and profile, giving what MySpace describes as “a more engaging and entertaining online experience.”

The biggest difference between todays launch and the beta launch is a link on the main MySpace page to the applications page: Minor in words but major in promoting MySpaces apps to MySpace’s user base. Users will also have one-click access to the Application Gallery from their home page through their individual control panels.
Since the beta launch, the MySpace Application Gallery has resulted in over 2.1 million installs from over 1,000 approved applications.

Link to MySpace Apps Gallery

Facebook launches translation tool following Googles example

Facebook today announced an application encouraging users to translate it's interface to other languages. Google did this for it's search engine interface years ago with tremendous success as the company realised that in order to be a real successful global company and to quickly enter and penetrate different local markets it's crucial to support the local market's languages.

They announce on their Website:

Join our community of translators and make Facebook available in your language.

Add the Translations Application to translate, review, and vote on translations in your language.

Once the translations for your language are complete and their quality has been verified by the community, your language will be launched for all Facebook users. After your language has been launched, you may continue to use the Translations application to translate and vote on translations for new Facebook features.

Currently open for translation:
Català, Čeština, Dansk, Euskara, Galego, Italiano, 한국어, Magyar, 日本語, Norsk, Nederlands, Polski, Português do Brasil, Română, Русский, Slovenščina, Suomi, Svenska, ภาษาไทย, Türkçe, 中文(简体), 中文(繁體)

Languages Facebook currently supports:
Français, Español, Deutsch

Applications Development for Social Networks - Standards not well implemented yet

As you all may know we at sixjumps build Community Marketing Applications for Social Networks. Our idea is to built an application once and deploy it seamlessly on all OpenSocial based Social Networks and Facebook using Facebook Markup Language. Facebook still sticks to its walled garden strategy and does not yet support OpenSocial.

As we are experimenting and building our applications first for Facebook such as SocialShopper, RealEstates Spain and Club Simyo we then took the step to do the same with OpenSocial.

As we were looking on the Application Programming Interface based on OpenSocial at orkut we quickly moved over to MySpace as the implementation was much better done.

So OpenSocial as a standard to follow is one thing and implementing the standard into a working and easy to use API is another story. Google and its partners should work on the implementations now in order to enable that applications could seamlessly run on all OpenSocial based Social Network Services Platforms.

At sixjumps we are convinced that our applications will run on Facebook, MySpace, orkut, Hi5 and hopefully Xing as well learning about the implementation differences of OpenSocial in the different Social Networks. Regarding Xing we don't know when they will publish their API and let developers deploy applications. I a press release a few months ago CEO and founder Lars Hinrichs announced that Xing would support OpenSocial in a near future.

Xing, the Social Business Network Service with 5 million plus users mainly in central Europe (Germany, Austria, Switzerland and spain), for us is most interesting as the users interact on that network almost only for business purposes such as Linkedin, the world wide leader with a real global user base.

We actually know very little about Linkedin's ideas regarding OpenSocial and don't think that they will change this on the short term as they are tremendously successful with their actual Platform concept and the underlying business model based on payed subscriptions.