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Facebook announced that the Facebook application platform would be opened to all social networks, after Bebo announced support for Facebook’s very successful application platform. Unfortunately for Google, this the biggest threat to their open social network platform, OpenSocial.

OpenSocial was meant to be a solution to a current problem – lack of compatibility between social networks. With the support of many major social networks: MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Tagged and of course – Google’s own Orkut. However, Facebook, with it’s own application platform, wasn’t interested. At the time, Facebook’s application platform was closed – applications could only be accessed through Facebook – but now that Facebook will be opened, everything’s different.

With an army of over 100,000 developers and thousands of applications with millions of installations, Facebook has an immense advantage over OpenSocial – momentum. OpenSocial’s advantage is that it’s not propriety and that no new languages are required (like Facebook’s markup language) – OpenSocial uses HTML, XML, and Javascript. The question is whether developers will choose to create applications for an established, proven platform or will they opt for the truly open platform that uses familiar programming languages.

Sadly, OpenSocial now it looks like an uphill battle.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 at 22:46 and is filed under Coding, Internet News, Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.