Facebook To Open Source Facebook Platform

  Michael Arrington

  71 comments »

Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications and have them run on those social networks, too.

Bebo already licenses the Facebook Platform, which allows third parties to make their Facebook applications work on Bebo, too. With the new announcement, social networks won’t need to go through the hassle of doing a deal with Facebook. They’ll simply map their existing APIs to Facebook Platform (which isn’t trivial) and go. Expect to see the four major technical pieces of Facebook Platform - FMBL (markup language), FQL (query language), FJS (Javascript library) and the Facebook API to be open sourced and made available to anyone.

If they mirror the Open Social approach, third parties will be free to change the Facebook Platform components for their own use and deploy them on their own sites. To have those changes be incorporated into the official versions of Facebook Platform, however, would require Facebook’s approval.

This is a nearly inevitable response to Open Social, which is backed by Google, MySpace and Yahoo. Open Social is also an open source platform, run the the Open Social Foundation. Facebook has been looking more and more like a walled garden of late, and they are being regularly out maneuvered by competitors. Time to fight back.

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CrunchBase Information

Facebook

Website:
facebook.com

Location:
Palo Alto, California, United States

Founded:
February 1, 2004

Funding:
$493M

On February 4th, 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook, a social network that was at the time exclusively for Harvard students. It was a huge hit, in 2 weeks, half of the student body… Learn More

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7 Kinds of SEX!

I buddy of mine passed this on to me on Facebook tonight & I just had to post it

Results of a recent research shows that there are 7 kinds of sex:

The 1st kind of sex is called Smurf Sex.

• This kind of sex happens when you first meet someone and you both have sex until you are blue in the face.

The 2nd kind of sex is called Kitchen Sex.

• This is when you have been with your partner for a short time and you are so needy you will have sex anywhere, even in the kitchen.

The 3rd kind of sex is called Bedroom Sex.

• This is when you have been with your partner for a long time. Your sex has gotten routine and you usually have sex only in your bedroom.

The 4th kind of sex is called Hallway Sex.

• This is when you have been with your partner for too long. When you pass each other in the Hallway you both say 'screw you.'

The 5th kind of sex is called Religious Sex.

• Which means you get Nun in the morning, Nun in the afternoon and Nun at night. (Very Popular)

The 6th kind is called Courtroom Sex.

• This is when you cannot stand your wife any more. She takes you to court and screws you in front of everyone.

And; Last, but not least,

The 7th kind of sex is called Canada Pension Sex.

• You get a little each month, but not enough to enjoy your self.
  

Technorati Tags: Sex,Lists,7 Kinds of sex

Image is everything

There was a time when doing a background check on a prospective employee or student applying for funding involved a long and expensive process. Google ended that ... a persons digital footprint can be researched with a click or two of the mouse. You should really think about that .....

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk Young warned over social websites The Information Commissioner's Office found more than half of those asked made most of their information public. Millions of young people could damage their future careers with the details about themselves they post on social networking websites, a watchdog warns. could damage their future careers with the details about themselves they post on social networking websites, a watchdog warn Some 71% of 2,000 14 to 21-year-olds said they would not want colleges or employers to do a web search on them before they had removed some material. The commission said the young needed to be aware of their electronic footprint. The ICO also said young people could be putting themselves at risk of identity fraud because of the material they post on social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. Vetting tool The data regulator's survey found that two thirds of those questioned accepted as friends on such websites people they did not even know.

Worth checking

clipped from www.makeuseof.com 6 Unique Web Communities That You Won’t Forget You may be well familiar with biggies like Youtube, Digg, Wikipedia, and StumbleUpon. They are all big and 100% user-powered websites. However, what about the smaller ones, focused on a single aspect and still able to attract a huge user base. So here you go, six really cool and fast growing communy-powered websites that you should definitely see. 1. Instructables - Extremely useful, entertaining and rather addictive online community where people share what they do and how they do it. Here you can find hundreds of excellent home-made DIY (Do It Yourself) guides detailing how to turn some of the garage junk into cool stuf, like invisible book shelf, hairspray-powered potato cannon or even making a wallet (from an old keyboard). See pic below.

Know your neighbourhood ... Facebook Demographics

2/3 female thats better odds than POF!

clipped from midnightexcess.wordpress.com [Update: before you get too far into these numbers, you might like to check out this updated post, which gives a more accurate breakdown of genders - the country totals remain the same] Out of interest I went through the Facebook ad platform to pull together some stats on relative numbers of members from each country. Not surprisingly, the US represents over 40% of the total membership at just over 18 million. Some surprises though (at least to me), with Turkey in 5th place. There’s quite a heavy bias to the ladies too, with female members making up just over 63% of the total population. I’m not able to see what criteria FB uses to present these numbers, so these may be members with just a basic profile, or those who have also filled in some additional personal details too. Full picture is below. Click on the image to open up so that you can see all the data. Exercise for the Reader: Facebook Member Stats

And the beat goes on....& on....&on

More static on the Facebook vs THE WORLD Written form a rather armature point of view but he dose make his point.

clipped from digg.com Open Social and the Future of Social Networking There has been a lot of talk around the web on why OpenSocial is just not open enough ( here, here and here). But for now lets rest the speculation of all the bloggers aside and have a look at the emergence of all theses platforms. It all started when facebook launched it platform (F8) at a conference earlier this year. This allowed developers to Submitted: 1 day 11 hr ago, made popular 1 hr 40 min ago Submitter: joey86   (news: submissions, diggs, comments) Topic: News » Technology » Industry News Source: createlf.no-ip.biz Share: Share Bury It: Bury OptionalDuplicate Story Spam Wrong Topic Inaccurate OK, This is Lame Favorite: Favorite?

The plot thickens

Leadership or control? You decide & is it important?

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / November 2, 2007 / 30 comments The Google-lead initiative called OpenSocial is all the buzz this week with anyone interested in online innovation, but beyond all the enthusiasm there are a number of questions that ought to be asked more visibly than they have been so far. Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / November 2, 2007 / 30 comments OpenSocial: Three Big Concerns OpenSocial is a hugely ambitious project that would tie together Google, MySpace and numerous other social networking platforms in a common environment that application publishers could publish widgets to with one set of code. There are some issues that need to be discussed about OpenSocial, however. It's not all a bed of roses, believe it or not. Here's my list of concerns, what's on yours? Is Google Exercising Leadership or Control? When rumors about OpenSocial started to take shape it appeared that it would be all based on Google - that communication between social networks

This starts to sound like a software giant scuffle

Further to the post introducing OpenSocial the following is a decent review and assessment of the relative value of each Social Network.

clipped from dondodge.typepad.com Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing 50M Facebook users don't care about OpenSocial APIsEmail This There are 50 Million Facebook users who don't know what OpenSocial APIs are...and don't care. There are about 5,000 tech bloggers and developers who think it is a revolution that will "Checkmate" Facebook and leave them with no moves. TechMeme has over 100 stories saying that OpenSocial is awesome and Facebook is dead. MySpace joins Google on OpenSocial initiative. OK, surely that settles it, Facebook is dead toast. Nope, not in my opinion. Are Facebook users going to cancel their account? No, I doubt it. Facebook was a runaway success long before they allowed 3rd party apps and widgets. I don't see Facbook users leaving because some widget might not be available, and I don't see widget developers abandoning Facebook just because there is a new OpenSocial API. Facebook is about the user community Facebook has always been focused on the user community and providing a great user experience.

Food for thought

Since most people (even the cash rich Google) feel the price tag on Facebook is way out of reality the flood of competition has started. Face it Facebook's interface is easily bettered and the cost of developing a 'new' king of the hill would be dramatically cheaper than buying a platform that is slowly drowning in application hell. When the Gods at Google [would that make them a Godgle] come up with a new platform its worth noting if only for the concept & how its going to effect everyone else.

clipped from code.google.com The web is better when it's social The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn. OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds. Many sites, one API Common APIs mean you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

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Would filtering clean up some of the trash????

There are far too many applications slowing down Facebook and some filtering would defiantly help ... read the following article and you'll agree

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com Why Facebook Should Introduce Filtering Written by Richard MacManus / October 8, 2007 / 1 comments Tim O'Reilly and team have done some interesting research into the rise of Facebook as an application platform. They released a report entitled The Facebook Application Platform, which we've been looking at in the virtual offices of Read/WriteWeb. One of the findings in the report is that Facebook apps follow the now familiar power law of popularity - a point also made by Alex Iskold in a R/WW post at the end of September. As the O'Reilly report put it: "a Facebook developer needs to build a huge viral hit to get anywhere near the top. As the aggregator, the company that benefits the most from niche applications is Facebook itself." Top 10 Facebook Apps Usage; chart by Alex Iskold, 27 Sept 2007 Alex's suggested solution was controversial - it got some kick back in the comments - but in light of the O'Reilly report it is worth considering:

And the march keeps on going & going & going!

Is there such a thing as too big? Facebook too big? It would be too easy to say yes its out of control but its growth is almost organic in nature ... can't be stopped even if they tried. It has become such a boy / girl next door connection & now that us old folks are getting on board the geographic boundaries are expanding and expanding and expanding...

The challenge is keeping the experience fresh, fast & transparent. Quite a challenge, but opening the code to developers meant a huge jump in applications and slowed the speed at time. I'm personally not overly impressed with the interface but I'm one out of 3 kazillion so who cares.

Transparency .... now there is a true challenge. In todays world of post 911 security issues and privacy laws, there is a mine field between here and the tomorrow of Facebook World.

clipped from money.cnn.com Facebook's plan to hook up the world The company's boy-wonder CEO wants to take social networking out of the dorm room and make it a platform for new businesses, reports David Kirkpatrick in a Fortune exclusive. By David Kirkpatrick, Fortune senior editor NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Imagine that when you shopped online for a digital camera, you could see whether anyone you knew already owned it and ask them what they thought. Imagine that when you searched for a concert ticket you could learn if friends were headed to the same show. Or that you knew which sites - or what news stories - people you trust found useful and which they disliked. Or maybe you could find out where all your friends and relatives are, right now (at least those who want to be found). This isn't fantasy. Facebook might make it possible, and soon. Yes, the social-networking site college kids spend so much time on - the one you thought was just about hooking up - could turn out to be more important than any of us thought.

Bullied student tickled pink by schoolmates' T-shirt campaign

This story just made my day. Its kids like these two young men (and those who rallied to the cause) that make me second guess my assumption that kids these days are all little shits.

Good for them!

clipped from www.cbc.ca Two Nova Scotia students are being praised across North America for the unique way they turned the tide against a fellow student bullied for wearing pink. The victim — a Grade 9 boy at Central Kings Rural High School in the small community of Cambridge — wore a pink polo shirt on his first day of school. Bullies harassed the boy, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up, students said. They went to a nearby discount store and bought 50 pink shirts, including tank tops, to wear to school the next day. Then the two went online to e-mail classmates to get them on board with their anti-bullying cause that they dubbed a "sea of pink." But a tsunami of support poured in the next day. Not only were dozens of students outfitted with the discount tees, but hundreds of students showed up wearing their own pink clothes, some head-to-toe. And there's been nary a peep from the bullies since, which Shepherd says just goes to show what a little activism will do.

Data Storage on Facebook? That might be a fix for painfully SLOW refreshing.

Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, is that all there is out there? No but it certainly is a force to deal with. I'm a member of the Halifax Network with a membership that is growing exponentially. When I first joined way back in April of this year there were 89,000 members in the Halifax Network, the last time I noticed the total had surpassed the 160,000 mark with no indication that its growth was slowing.

The growth of members PLUS the explosion of applications all requiring off server processing has slowed the experience to a crawl. Now to be clear I'm sitting on a racer of a computer with gobs of ram and I've got ultra high speed internet (consistently well over T1 speed) but there are times I can get up and go get a coffee - upstairs and around the back of the house, come back down and the sight is just finishing refreshing.

If making data storage available to developers speeds up the Facebook experience, then whats the hold up... get it on line now.

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com Written by Josh Catone / September 17, 2007 / 0 comments Rev2.org is reporting that buried deep in the Facebook Developer wiki is mention of a Data Store API hinting at Facebook's possible intention of offering data storage to app developers. The wiki page was updated this morning to announce that the service is now in open beta and is accessible by any application (any app developers out there want to shed more light on this one?). Just this afternoon I wrote about platform definitions floated by Marc Andreessen, who called Facebook a level 2 platform -- or a "plug in API." It seems like Facebook might be transitioning into what Andreessen would call a level 3 platform -- one that "handles everything required to run your application on your behalf." Facebook to Offer Data Storage?