OpenSocial 0.8 specs out - Facebook opensources big parts of its platform

It's funny but true. The same day OpenSocial 0.8 specs are out Facebook announces to Opensource its platform.

This is great news for developers on one side but bad news on the other: We still have to follow two standards if we want to build our applications for specific social Networks.

Bebo just "licensed" Facebook for its application API and on the other hand we have the powerful OpenSocial community.

We'll see who's going to win the battle - either Microsoft backed Facebook or the Google-Yahoo-AOL powered OpenSocial community. By the way I never understood how Microsoft thought that Yahoo would accept any offer as they are to much good friends with Google.

Facebook itself comments on the Opensourcing of big parts of its platform:

The goal of this release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running your own test servers, building tools, or optimizing your applications on this technology. We’ve built in extensibility points, so you can add functionality to Facebook Open Platform like your own tags and API methods. We’re also hoping you use Facebook Open Platform in ways we’ve never thought of – just as you showed off your creativity with Facebook Platform, we hope this lets you be creative with the foundation of the platform itself.

Full OpenSocial 0.8 specs

Download Facebook Open Platform

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!

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