MySpace now has Developer Platform

Well, it was going to happen sooner or later. MySpace now has a Developer Platform for developers to write applications into MySpace, following Facebook. It's interesting that MySpace is following Google's OpenSocial API. In fact, there are a number of companies collaborating with Google on this. But Facebook is not on this list.

It'll be interesting to see how this develops. So far, every social networking site or so creates their own API for developers, there is no unifying API. Google's OpenSocial is meant to unify this. The OpenSocial API is a wrapper to hook into other social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, and makes writing a social application easier. Ning is kind of doing something like this where you can create social apps based on templates, but it's not doing any type of development platform like I see with MySpace and Facebook.

On Technorati: MySpace, Facebook, OpenSocial

Facebook and business

Everybody knows that Facebook is the social network out there. It's not just for teens or students anymore, as Facebook has opened its platform to developers and to anyone out there. This is great that Facebook has done that because now, we have seen so many applications written for Facebook, one of the more popular ones is Scrabulous which is addictive but doesn't require both people to be online at the same time to play. Other social networking applications and companies out there are competing with Facebook, not Google. Google has not gotten close to what Facebook has done, although they are getting into the social networking game with their OpenSocial API. And then there's word that Google wants to create a social graph of all your networks. Of course the term social graph has been used before in Computer Science even though Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has used this term.

Anyways, what am I trying to get at? Facebook IS useful and increasingly so according to Harry Chen from UMBC. He talks about why people should be using and joining Facebook. He specifies three reasons for this:

1. Interact with friends who you don’t see often
2. Gain new competitive advantages
3. Learn by playing

This means that businesses need to be getting on board which many are by tapping the social networks within Facebook by writing Facebook applications.

On Technorati: Facebook, Google, OpenSocial

Google's OpenSocial API

It looks like my thoughts as to why Google hasn't explored the social networking space is now answered. Besides having Google creating a large social network graph (according to Eric Schmidt), Google is also creating APIs to allow applications to easily use social networking information. Google has something called the OpenSocial API, more information from one of Google's employees on their blog. It seems Google has quite a number of partners on board using their API. This is something to definitely look at, as you can't reckon with a force like Google.

On Technorati: OpenSocial, Google, social network