In Your Facebook, Google …
by John Paczkowski
Posted on December 13, 2007 at 4:07 AM PT
Facebook threw a well-timed sucker punch at Google’s “Everybody-But-Facebook” OpenSocial initiative this week, extending Facebook Platform–a set of tools that allows developers to build applications for Facebook–to other social-networking sites and platforms.
“[We] want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model,” Facebook senior platform manager Ami Vora said in a blog post announcing the move. “In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms. Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve, but by enabling other social sites to use what we’ve learned, everyone wins–users get a better experience around the Web, developers get access to new audiences, and social sites get more applications. “
Among the first sites to avail themselves of the Facebook Platform standards was Bebo, an OpenSocial partner. Isn’t that a bit of a slap in the face for Google? Bebo co-founder and CEO Michael Birch says no. When OpenSocial finally launches, Bebo will support it as well. “OpenSocial and the Facebook Platform are clearly different platforms,” Birch told News.com. “Our lazy development team said they couldn’t do both at once.”
