Building Apps for Facebook: an open API means what?
The big news at the top of techmeme today is that Facebook has opened up its API, and Bebo has cloned it.
Dave McClure says: welcome to the Social Graph Platform wars.
And I’m sure he’s right that this is part of the joust between Facebook and Google for who gets to own the development platform for social networks. So what exactly is Facebook doing?
From their developer news post:
Now we also want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms.
That sounds to me like:
- Feel free to clone us
- If you pay us, we’ll let you copy+paste
This is probably going to work out fine for Facebook. Other networks would love to get access to the insane number of creative apps that have been developed for Facebook, and Facebook would love to get paid for that access (or at the least, not have apps being developed on OpenSocial).
In the long run, we’re still headed for an environment where a developer can build one app, and run it everywhere. Maybe it will be like PC desktop publishing, where you can use C, C++, Java, I don’t know, FORTRAN? Whatever, if you compile it, it runs.
More thoughts on this as things start happening…
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I think the other, maybe even funnier part to this is that this week we saw the likes of Linked In and Friendster debut all new proprietary application spaces. Meanwhile Facebook is giving theirs away. In a world where someone will easily choose not rewriting code over having to port it at all, Facebook stands to again lean into that OS-type realm where they can best ignore the competition.
I was mildly excited on Monday with Linked In’s announcement, but here by the middle of the week it was already not-that-special, even if parts of it were relatively interesting and cool. We’re into so much “me-too” between social networking sites that Facebook’s rolled with that situation by saying, “well hey, if you’re gonna ‘me-too’ our strategy why not use our actual architecture?”
An intriguing and relatively speedy path to this point, I feel, since this summer’s initial API announcement. Will we be as interested if Linked In does the same in 6 months?
We’re into so much “me-too” between social networking sites that Facebook’s rolled with that situation by saying, “well hey, if you’re gonna ‘me-too’ our strategy why not use our actual architecture?”
Awesome.
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