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

Great, when do we get a Slashdot API?

[psykocrime]

Great, when do we get a Slashdot API????

Social Networking Protocol

[Carthag]

For a while now I've been hoping that a general protocol would come out and replace the centralized networking sites. It would be fairly trivial to create a handshaking system over a simple p2p network that allows you to set the friend-status of other nodes. These nodes would then be able to access a local profile based on their status. The profile could contain pretty much anything that the user wishes to include in it. It'd have to be user-friendly though. Of course the hand-shaking needs to be secure so people can't crawl the network for personal information, but that could possibly be done with public/private keys or a similar scheme.

I don't have time to code any of this, though, but it would be a million times more efficient than the current system where you have some friends on some sites and some friends on others.

Re:Security?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't use a username/password to log the user in. Users log in through the facebook website which passes an timed expiry identification key back to the 3rd party application.