Saturday, November 03, 2007

open social, developers love reusability.

Not so long ago, Facebook released a public API and developers went crazy, marketers drooled, anyone with any interest in reaching the youth demographic started to rethink about how they can bring their products through this channel. A new type of web application was now available, a plugin to your existing Facebook account.
The problem?
Facebook controls the language, their own proprietary/new syntax FBML, they tended to break deployed code with their security/feature improvements, they control which applications users can browse and see/add. Worst of all, your 'Facebook applications' code could not be re-used easily.

Open social, Google and the rest of the gang answer... Trys to learn from some of Facebooks lessons.. and of course, one up them whenvever possible. Its still a plugin model, but if you know HTML/Javascript, you know how it works out of the box. You want to deploy the same application on multiple social networks? Ok. You want to maintain one set of code for your application? Who doesn't. Time will tell where open social goes -- but my guess would be further than FB's API.... And if Microsoft didn't now have a stake of Facebook, FB would maybe consider supporting it sooner.

Developers buy some coffee beans and grab a few cases of your favorite caffeinated soda -- It's going to be a wild next few months.

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