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.'"

Nothing New

[Anonymous Coward]

This is nothing new. The API's to many social networking sites are already open.

Considering the fact that Flickr is one of the first ones, see this particular use of the its APIs:

http://blogs.sun.com/MortazaviBlog/entry/persopoli s_the_takht_e_jamshid [sun.com].

Re:Facebook

[cashman73]

Or, you can just sign up without having any particular affiliation. Facebook opened its doors to the general public sometime in September or October, 2006.

Re:Social Networking Protocol

[Bogtha]

There's a decentralised RDF-based "Semantic Web"-type version in the form of FOAF [foaf-project.org]. You can already browse it with software like FOAFnaut [foafnaut.org] etc [jibbering.com], and generate your own FOAF file with FOAF-a-matic [ldodds.com]. There was a crawler called Plink [battellemedia.com], but that seems to be dead now.

Re:Social Networking Protocol

[drinkypoo]

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.

I can't tell if this makes sense or not. Please define "node" in this context.

If what you mean is another webserver, then I don't think this is at all necessary or in fact even desirable. I think what is necessary is simply exposing congruent properties. For example you need to provide a means for account validation from a hashed password without providing the password back to the caller, and you need to make various values available. This is best done with a standard format for information interchange, and I don't mean the american one.

In other words it would be best if in addition to any custom APIs provided, the sites also provided a standard one. It should be simple XML for back-and-forth compatibility. This is pretty much all that is needed for collaboration between them, provided you implement the authentication system. That way you can have an affiliation of any type of sites and share member between them.

Keep in mind, however, that most of these social networking sites will fight you with everything they have. They depend on attracting as many visitors as possible and convincing them to eschew all others, which is easy because most people would prefer not to flop between sites.

I still think the actual answer is just to run your own blog, and let google (and others) handle the social aspect. Why associate myself with myspace? Of course this is still hard for a lot of people, but it's getting easier all the time. For example I could go with a hosting provider with fantastico, install drupal (or wordpress or whatever) via that, and then use the appropriate functionality to tie myself in with a network of other like-engined sites. There are also modules for some of these to participate with others...

Admin-less wiki with a secure session image

[Anonymous Coward]

Did some people try a millenium ago to have a passwordless moderation system with a secure randomly generated image? (that changes every time you load it like on profilemix.com's world visitors map) I think this would solve many of the basic problems of wiki administration... unless you hate democracy. (if it worked)