Social Networking Sites Opening Their APIs

prostoalex writes "Business Week magazine is looking at social networking sites opening their APIs to third-party developers to enable social applications not supported by the network itself. Facebook is setting an example by releasing their API from beta into 1.0, and many others are expected to follow the suit. Quoting from the article: 'Since Facebook, a network of 17 million college students, started a pilot program last summer, third-party developers have created some 100 new applications. Now a Facebook user name and password can be used to log in to content-sharing and chat site Mosoto, and to automatically import Facebook friends into Mosoto's buddy list for chat. Facebook itself does not offer a chat function.'"

Comments

Above and beyond

[CLorox]

These open APIs are allowing developers to go so far beyond what Facebook was originally designed for, that it makes you wonder if these addins will spin off with their own system, eclipsing the original site. Mosoto http://www.mosoto.com/ doesn't just add IM style chat from your Facebook friends, but file sharing and streaming audio to everyone in your list as well.

Re:Social Networking Protocol

[stickystyle]

That would be...

http://appleseed.sourceforge.net/