It's widely believed that OpenSocial was setup as a direct response to the social networking phenomenon that is Facebook. The Facebook API allows developers to make viral applications to spread through the network, meaning more content for users, opportunites for developers, and increased revenue and traffic for Facebook.
OpenSocial was an attempt to go a step up on this concept by providing a common framework allowing many social networking sites to utilise 3rd-party applications, to not only provide extra content for the site users as per above but also to provide a means of linking networks. However, in the last hour the Facebook API development team have announced that the Facebook Platform Architecture is being opened up for use on other websites or 'containers' (ref: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=60) What does this mean? The Facebook API is well advanced over OpenSocial, having been in public use for over 16 months now. It also supports viral features such as inviting friends, publishing content to news feeds and user profiles. The new system, already being dubbed 'OpenFacebook' by 3rd-party developers on the FB Dev forums, is essentially a more advanced version of OpenSocial. Whats more, the API is not going to change - the maelstrom of applications already produced by over 100,000 Facebook developers will work on any implemented containers with no need for these developers to edit any existing code. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OpenSocial API Definition" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-api?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
