Inside Facebook

Facebook is likely to open-source the Facebook Platform APIs, FBML, FQL, and Javascript libraries soon, Techcrunch speculates this morning. Given the current “social platform wars” with Google, open sourcing Facebook Platform standards would create an alternative platform to OpenSocial for social websites to integrate rich third party applications.

Bebo has already licensed the Facebook Platform architecture for its own platform, and a flood of Facebook applications have been published on the Bebo platform since they run almost completely out of the box. By allowing anyone to adopt the Facebook Platform architecture, Facebook would hope to create greater entrenchment in the developer community on building on the Facebook architecture.

For containers, implementing the Facebook Platform standards is no easy task. In addition to supporting all the Facebook Platform features, you’ll have to maintain your platform over time to keep it in sync with Facebook’s standards. However, by adopting the Facebook Platform, you’ll be able to pitch developers of the over 25,000 currently published Facebook applications that they can reach your users with little to no further work.

For developers, the increased standardization of social containers will always be a good thing. However, as developers have learned with OpenSocial, just because different containers adopt the same architecture doesn’t mean that it’s always easy to port between containers. Different containers have different restrictions and extensions, so some changes will always need to be made.

2:00pm Update: A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed the company’s plans, stressing intended benefits for developers:

“We’re working on an open-source initiative that is meant to help application developers better understand Facebook Platform and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running their own test servers, building tools, or optimizing their applications. As Facebook Platform continues to mature, open-sourcing the infrastructure behind it is a natural step so developers can build richer social applications and share what they’ve learned with the ecosystem. Additional details will be released soon.”

As the Facebook Platform nears its one year anniversary - making it the “elder” amongst social networking platforms - the OpenSocial initiative continues to move forward. While the OpenSocial spec is still in version 0.7 and key containers like MySpace are rolling out full OpenSocial support very slowly, OpenSocial has come a long way since it was announced six months ago.

I sat down with Google’s Patrick Chanezon, OpenSocial Evangelist to social networks, developers, and advertisers, to get his perspective on the state of OpenSocial six months in.

Patrick, what new trends stand out to you at this juncture for OpenSocial?

We’re still very early. Now that OpenSocial is reaching 200 million users, we’re starting to see a lot more people ask how they can be involved.

We’ve seen a lot of big social networks adopt the OpenSocial standard. Now, we’re starting to see some enterprises experiment with OpenSocial internally. For example, SocialSite by Sun is helping any site become a container out of the box.

We’re also seeing the beginning of some new things on professional networks (as opposed to “social” networks). For example, when the LinkedIn sandbox opens soon, I think we’ll see different types of applications - more productivity oriented - with different types of business models - perhaps subscription models.

What business models do you think are working well for developers on the big social network containers?

There’s great opportunity to work with the brand advertisers. They’re ready to start experimenting with application campaigns. There’s definitely market opportunity now.

However, there hasn’t been as much done in the way of e-commerce yet. Buy.com’s Garage Sale application is one example, but most commerce apps are just doing referrals. I’m curious to see what eBay is going to do in this space.

In the bigger picture, how do you think social platforms are changing the web right now?

The standardization and acceptance of APIs is really accelerating the distribution of the web. Currently, most social web sites contain content that is generated 70% internally and 30% externally. I expect this trend to reverse over the next 5 years.

We may see new developments if certain applications are able to socialize a majority of one type of vertical content across multiple social networking platforms (like music, movies, etc), becoming meta-networks themselves. In that case, they will probably create their own APIs for developers to use. Vertical-specific OpenSocial APIs could be necessary at that point.

Finally Patrick, how would you characterize Google’s interest in the Friend Connect “dispute” with Facebook lately?

We are actively talking with Facebook about different ways to make Friend Connect work with the Facebook Platform.

Ultimately, we’re genuinely interested in making the open web grow faster, because Google is good at monetizing the web. We want to make building on the web as easy as possible, and we’ve been doing open source projects for a long time to support that. For AJAX development, we created the Google Web Toolkit. For offline development, we created Google Gears. Anyone can use these. Now, for social applications, we’ve created OpenSocial. The web is becoming increasingly social, and we want to make it easier to build and grow the social web.

It’s been a very interesting week in the world of social platforms and data sharing: after years of talk in the data portability community, industry behemoths Facebook, MySpace, and Google all announced major data, identity, and privacy portability initiatives within the span of 3 business days.

• Thur May 8: MySpace announces its “Data Availability” initiative, whereby it will share public user profile data with partner sites like Yahoo, eBay, and Twitter.
• Fri May 9: Facebook announces its “Facebook Connect” initiative, which will let third party developers access Facebook user profile and friend data.
• Mon May 12: Google announces its “Friend Connect” initiative, which will let users do much of the same thing through an OAuth/OpenID/OpenSocial system administered by Google.

None of these press events, however, included any actual product announcements. It’s something Marc Andreessen called a case of “strategitis” - making big strategy announcements before developers or users have any products to test out.

Today, Facebook upped the ante significantly by announcing that it is banning Google Friend Connect from the Facebook Platform for violating the Platform terms of service. Facebook’s Charlie Cheever writes,

All Facebook Platform developers agree to the Developer Terms of Service, which strictly limit the collection, use, and redistribution of user information. We have technology and a team to ensure applications abide by those policies.

We’re excited that our industry partners are taking greater steps toward openness and enabling users to share their information around the web. We hope, though, that we can collectively find a model that allows users to share data while protecting the privacy of our users’ data and ensuring that the user is always in control.

In the past, when we found applications passing user data to another party (for instance, to ad networks for the purpose of targeting), we suspended those applications and worked with those developers to ensure they respect user privacy. Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we’ve had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We’ve reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose.

We think MySpace’s Data Availability, Google Friend Connect, and Facebook Connect can be part of a great movement in the industry to give users a better and safer experience online, while respecting user privacy. We look forward to working with our developer community and everyone else in the industry to help all of our users take their information, and their privacy, with them wherever they go.

The amount of innovation in this space right now is good for everyone, but ultimately, Facebook, Google, MySpace, and other social networking platforms have major challenges ahead to provide the kind of portability users want without violating user privacy or cutting platforms out of the loop. We’ll stay on top of this story as it unfolds.