Yostivanich

Face­book, on Decem­ber 12^th announced that they will be licens­ing the Face­book Plat­form meth­ods and calls. In essence if you have writ­ten an appli­ca­tion for Face­book, it will be able to run on other sites that have a license for FB plat­form. This could be the shot that killed Open Social before it ever even really took off.

As seen in this Google Group for Open Social the To-Do list for Open Social is pretty exten­sive and this was only 2 weeks ago. Open Social is not even in an Alpha stage yet. Face­book on the other hand has the momen­tum with both devel­op­ers and users. Google is attempt­ing to defeat this by lever­ag­ing the abil­ity for devel­op­ers to write-once run-anywhere men­tal­ity and cross the bound­aries of a site. Face­book has just defeated this with­out even try­ing and done one bet­ter. Bebo has announced that they will be using the FB plat­form for there site. Bebo is one of the largest social net­work­ing sites in the United States, num­ber 3, and the largest in the United King­dom. Bebo will also be sup­port­ing Open Social but that is a mere foot­note in this story.

Has Face­book killed Open Social? Google has a lot of love from devel­op­ers and the media as does Face­book even in light of recent pri­vacy con­cerns over FB Bea­con. Both Google and Face­book have pas­sion­ate and active users, although Facebook’s are more active mainly owing to the site’s nature. Google has been viewed as one of the few sites on the inter­net inter­ested in aggre­gat­ing and free­ing data and mak­ing it avail­able to the pub­lic at large (except of course for infor­ma­tion regard­ing it’s top exec­u­tives, search data and PageR­ank algo­rithm). Face­book on the other hand is exactly the oppo­site, it locks your data away behind a wall of reg­is­tra­tion and requires you to try and find all your friends to cre­ate a use out of itself.

I love both Google and Face­book, I use them both con­stantly through­out the day, how­ever I want to be able to pull all my data out on my friends all the time. I want a super con­tact man­age­ment sys­tem, that inte­grates with all online appli­ca­tions, desk­top clients, phones and other mobile devices. I have a Palm Pilot with data locked behind it’s prop­er­tiy for­mat. I have a phone that I can send data back and forth to the palm with Blue­tooth but can’t sync to each other. On top of that I have my email con­nec­tions which can’t con­nect to either. I have my con­tacts in Face­book with all their data locked behind Face­book. All of this data is use­ful to me and I want access to all of it at any time. I don’t want to have to go to my email client to find a person’s email address, I don’t want to enter in infor­ma­tion from a busi­ness card into 3 or more places and then find them on all my social net­works (Face­book, Twit­ter, LinkedIn, etc.).

That would a killer application/format a way to pull my data out of every site, make it eas­ily trans­fer­able to any other appli­ca­tion or device. If it could sync and keep all the devices and appli­ca­tions up to date and cur­rent with all the infor­ma­tion that would be even bet­ter. Plaxo with Pulse is com­ing close to this but there are still some prob­lems with it’s service.

Before any­one leaves any com­ments telling me that I can do this using Out­look for Email and a Win­dows Mobile device, I want to have the option of chang­ing devices and soft­ware on the fly, which that doesn’t allow me. I am in essence locked into Out­look and Win­dows, still gen­er­at­ing the same prob­lem. I want the free­dom to switch devices and pro­grams at will, and this in essence will make me a more likely pur­chaser of a device if I can try it out with­out hav­ing to do a lot of work to make it my device, ie. it con­tains my infor­ma­tion on my contacts.

I don’t think Face­book has killed Open Social com­pletely but it’s made Face­book more entrenched into being the pre­mier social net­work site at least for the moment.