Facebook announced today that it will be opening up its code. Dubbed Facebook Open Platform or fbOpen, this move is viewed as being in direct competition to Google’s OpenSocial which is also an open source development platform for creating social apps.
“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 More»

Labels: Facebook, google, open social, Open Source, social media

Revolutionary activity may be needed in the social networking space soon to help make sure that all the key players make sure social networking standards continue to become more open, more transparent, and always *user centric*.

Dan Farber noted in an excellent post today:
It’s time for the social networks, like the 13 colonies in 1774banding together to be free of British authority, to unite and manifest that theWeb is by and for the users.

I say … Huzzah! It’s imperative that individual users and the More»

Labels: Facebook, MySpace, open social, social networks

Larry Dignan and Dan Farber at CNET have the early scoop on Yahoo’s freshly unveiled Yahoo! Open Strategy somewhat cryptically labelled …. “Y!OS”
Ari Balogh, Yahoo CTO said at the San Francisco Web 2.0 Conference today:
“We are taking open to a whole other place,”… “We are rewiringYahoo from the inside out with a developer platform that will open up the assetsof Yahoo in a way never done before, making the consumer experience socialthroughout and provide hooks to developers.”

It is too early to know if this type of openness will be embraced by developers to the More»

Labels: google, open social, web 2.0, Yahoo, YHOO

A new social networking alliance will include internet powerhouses Google, Yahoo, and Myspace in an “Open Social Foundation“. Facebook’s absence from this list is something of a social networking elephant in the room as Facebook is generally considered the key innovator and eventual market leader in the social networking space.
The Open Social Foundation will, according to the Yahoo Press release today, work to ensure:
… the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web…The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, More»

Labels: Facebook, MySpace, open social, Yahoo

Here at Mashup Camp Chris Schalk from Google just wrapped up an excellent presentation about Open Social - the open source social networking environment spearheaded by Google along with partners like Myspace, Ning, Plaxo, and hundreds more.
Shindig, the ¨container” for social applications, appears to be ready for outtside development now. The lack of a container was a concern at the initial launch of Open Social.
One can make a strong case that Open Social and the Open Handset Alliance are the most significant open source projects now under broad deployment, both because they are backed by Google dollars and ingenuity More»

Labels: Facebook, open social, opensocial, shindig