I’m about to take my family to Europe for the summer. We’ll start off in Amsterdam at ‘the Next Web’ conference and eventually end up in Trieste, using it as a base for European activity this summer. I’ll even jump over to India for Gaurav’s wedding.

But more importantly - this is the summer of Facebook. And their open APIs!

I can’t stress to you more how important Facebook’s open APIs and platform are to our industry! Not only do they put the heat on MySpace, but also they serve notice to Bebo, Twitter, Friendster, MyBlogLog, hi5, Multiply and all the otehr ’socal web’ plays as well.

From now on - EVERY social web app will be judged by it’s openness!

And it won’t stop there.

Just being open won’t be enough. We’ll ask “do you support OpenID?” - “do you enable me to use the Attribute Exchange?” - “are you gonna lock me in - or what?”

This is about the end-users winning - not Facebook.

The activity around Facebook is heating up - as well. It’s not just developers who are swarming to sign up. But important industry veterans are - as well. This is not just about students and business people anymore.

Facebook has declared itself the first ‘people’s platform‘ - and they intend on changing the way the game is played! On this day of Memorializing our dead soldiers, lets rejoice in thanking Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.

This is important!

This all reminds me of when Orkut first went live. Orkut was the first SNS to get ‘industry’ people to join. Allot of that had to do with Google and their upcoming IPO, but allot of it also had to do with curiosity - “what is this SNS thing - anyway?”

Joi Ito and I gamed the Orkut system - proving that you really didn’t have to be someone’s friend to be their friend - and that all the other ‘interactions’ and analytics inside of Orkut was also bunk - as well. That’s about the time that danah boyd started waking people up to what was really going on.

The feeding frenzy around Facebook proves that this is happening all over again. Leaders like Mitch Kapor and Roger McNamee are joining - just about everybody else I know is joining and all of a sudden Facebook is the place to be.

Now we’re here - 3 years later - Google is public, MySpace got bought and Facebook is setting the litmus on openness. Over the next few days (once I get settled in ASmsterdam) I’ll look into the details of Facebooks APIs, their TOS (terms of service) and just what are the range of possibilities they’re offering.

I sure hope their lawyers haven’t goofed things up - again.

But I’m hopeful. Microsoft and Amazon wouldn’t have supported it - if they didn’t think it was coolio.

And for me - and PeopleAggregator. Well lets just say “Facebook is a DLA” - evidence of what I’ve been talking about for a while now. Folks want their OWN portal.  AND THEY WANT IT OPEN.

Brands want their OWN customer facing web presence.

And we ALL want open platforms - so we can freely do what we wanna do.

So from now on - we’re gonna call PeopleAggregator - the “Facebook-in-a-Box” - as we got one for YOU to build and offer to end-users. You don’t have to be locked into ANY platform, you can have your own.

Bringing social to software - that’s our motto.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 8:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.