Via Techcrunch and Facebook Dev blog:
Google Open what?
CEO Michael Birch says that it has been developing these parallel languages for about five months and in communication with Facebook itself, which has been assisting Bebo in its efforts to essentially adopt its platform.
This is very very important for Ireland since Bebo is still the main social networking site here. I still believe Facebook is where it’s at in terms of social networks and current figures show that Facebook now stands at 190k+ users in Ireland but as of a few weeks time applications like Scrabulous can be installed on Bebo. Scrabulous has more mindshare than Facebook it seems and this comes from FB people! If you are an application developer it’s all good as Bebo is mirroring the application markup language that Facebook is using. What is probably most important is that this will allow cross-platform interaction. Play scrabulous via Facebook against your kid brother on Bebo. If you’re a business that wants to reach a large audience and saw Facebook as easier to build for, well now all that’s changed again. Now you don’t have to pay thousands to have your application approved by Bebo and accessed by their userbase. I wonder what those companies will say who paid a lot to load their applications onto Bebo?
One wonders will we see the same happen with other social networking sites? I think we will. Great move by Bebo but this is a coup for Facebook. They just open-socialed Open Social. Of course every other social network will want Facebook applications to be installed on their site and ways to interlink with Facebook’s 50Million users. Next year they’ll have 100Million on the site. I assume we’ll soon see cross-network IM, chat, gaming and VOIP and all done before Open Social.
I’m betting a tenner the werewolves and ninjas applications will be the most popular though.
