Heads up to all you closed platforms out there (Dan Gould - are you reading this?)

Facebook is about to announce an expanded open platform which should set a litmus for all social networks moving forward.  I’ve heard from several friends and sources that they’re very serious about turning their platform into a destination platform and that they realize that close ties and open interfaces to developers is key to that strategy.

The reports you’ll hear - and the positioning - will be about running web servcies and complementary offering on ‘pages’ inside of Facebook - but I sure as hell hope that they don’t think that’s the only way we’ll be hooking up to their system.

I hope they realize that they need to just provide open APis and let the marketplace evolve and propser accordingly.

After 9 months of thinking that their TOS was onerous and that they were up to no good - the Facebook dudes I met at Mix07 assured me that they did NOT intend to try and play any games and lock up any user’s data.

So now we’ll have to go back and look at this next round of APIs and see what the TOS reads ike.

But I’m just being nit picky. In general Facebook is rocking the house and will put pressure on MySpace, Bebo and the rest - to open up.

Which is a good thing - for all.  No - not just good - it’s a GREAT Thing. The kind of action that causes great leadership and permamnence in the marketplace.

Congrats to Mr. Zuckerberg on down………………

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 12:35 pm 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.