Just don’t try to take your social graph out of Facebook.

Wow. I can’t say I saw this coming.
I guess that’s good news for everyone. For some reason I just imagine Facebook having the Microsoft mentality, especially considering their lack of willingness about moving your data in and out.

Digg it:

http://digg.com/tech_news/Face.....pen_Source

“Just don’t try to take your social graph out of Facebook.”

Or else you get Scobled

Sounds like what dinosaurs did — got super huge before they were bettered by smarter competitors and became extinct.

Open Social is also an open source platform, run the the Open Social Foundation. -and that open social foundation link just links to a placeholder site

note to self: there are still typos here

@Robert Scoble - Ditto

I’m not sure why this makes sense to anyone.

What would breaking news be without typos? It’s quite open source to “let it flow.”

hey guys do check out my tecnology blog at http://www.thewam.worpress.com

Oh great… now Facebook is going to try to change the definition of “open source” too? Madness.

There should really be an OpenID approach for social networking. Think of the abilities of that!

This kinda looks like shovelware to me, not very well thought out. OpenSocial is designed at a high level to work with many containers, it is very easy to implement, so it bolts on rather nicely to any system. It has a spec, as well as a reference implementation, as well as a half dozen or more implementing containers. Stuff like FQL on the other hand, is very much tied to FB’s schema, so mapping FQL to any arbitrary social container is alot harder than the equivalent OpenSocial mapping. FBML doesn’t fare much better. The “weight” of the FB platform is alot heavier than the OS equivalents.

This smells like fail to me, an act of desperation. FB has not been very good at their open source projects. They abandoned their Java client library (which was a terribly written POS that looked like the implementors didn’t even know the Java language)

@13 I like your take on it. It doesn’t look right to me either. And FQL - while pretty generic in some aspects, would not run no where near as effeciently on other networks without some very interesting implementation challenges.

Now how will MySpace react to this ….. care to guess

Open Social is just APIs. Open source implies a lot more. Much about this decision depends on the open source license Facebook chooses, what code they decide to release, and how openly the project roadmap is managed.

By open sourcing the platform, it’s going to make it hard for anyone else to displace them. An upside for Facebook is that all the social graphs created by the adopters will be virtually locked into the same roadmap as Facebook.

Like most open source projects inside a commercial enterprise, Facebook will get to chart a course that is largely to their advantage. They will get to incorporate more than widgets from their community, and be able to effortlessly propel the platform into every kind of enterprise. It could become the standard creating any depth of social graph. Facebook can then let adopters around the world deal with their own privacy issues locally.

@dallas
How about OpenID through email somehow? Nobody is the boss of me.

Hey Mike, Your Eurekster widget has been broken for about a week. When are they going into the dead pool?

Wow, nicely played by Facebook. I didn’t think they had it in them. I can’t say they would have done this without Google/OpenSocial/Friend Connect and the market forces but this is why competition is good.

have been waiting for this to happen! i wonder what their investors think….

Smart move, encouragable move, applause.

why not just join open social…all this does is add an unnecessary layer of complication. unless of course its truly open source, and not just shared set of apis

Facebook support open source??

Sounds like just another mechanism/scheme for Facebook to suck more social graph data into the Facebook silo. If that data comes back out into these satellite networks I will be very surprised. I don’t see what’s in it for developers. Facebook apps suck. Facebook is defintely going into a defensive mode which in my opinion is a good thing for everyone, including Facebook.

> Open Social is just APIs

http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/

Facebook have 450 employees ,is more small than alibaba

At the very least, this could ease the creation of a nice test environment for developing applications. Then I could do app development “on a plane” (with appologies to DHH

@22
Facebook does support open source.
http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php

@24 - what does it have to do with alibaba?

Woohoo. Go Facebook

They have enough critical mass now that they can only benefit from the improvements people make rather than be challenged by someone else running on the platform.

This was an inevitable move that we talked about long ago as a necessity… I am however surprised that it is being done so quickly after the latest Open Social announcements. I guess Mark et al are much quicker to respond then I thought possible. Congrats.

Anyone care to ponder what this means for the potential Microsoft FB rumors?

Wow, and Google the champion of openness will open source their technology too - or just calling others to open.

So, won’t it be time for Google to open source their Orkut ?

If not, how can Google claim to have out-open Facebook — platform’wise

You guys are clueless (@29 and 30). OpenSocial already is Open Source. Never heard of Apache Shindig? (http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/) It’s a lot more useful than this Facebook announcement. With Shindig, you practically have a social network container ready to run out of the box.

Shindig is more than Open Social, also contains an open source implementation of Google’s Gadget API specification, as well as Caja.

@31 — Open Social is good, but not a complete story. The best one can say is openness(google open social) is at par with openness(facebook), but not OUT-open — didn’t Google want to out-open facebook? And, is Orkut not a social platform? And, “Open Social platform” == “Orkut platform” ?

Or, a good way for Google to look open source, less their core parts — not unreasonable. But don’t say Google has out-opened Facebook. They have not, yet.

This would be huge… even if you think Google is an open lovable fuzzball and Facebook is an evil proprietary walled garden, F8 has many technical advantages. I would much rather see social networking sites use a an F8-style platform than the iframe/script approach of OpenSocial, no matter how noble OpenSocial may be. As a developer and a user, I see many advantages to Facebook’s architecture.

In fact, I was just talking about this on Chris Messina’s blog. This announcement would add another factor to his insightful perspective.

@33 — we’ve evaluated both the F8 approach and the Open Social approaches in extra detail (including both the Java version and the PHP version of the OpenSocial Shindig). Must say, yes, A-G-R-E-E !!!

@32 Sorry, but I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.

1) Open Social != Orkut. Orkut in fact, was ironically, lagging behind the implementations of Plaxo and hi5 at some points. Yes, Google’s own platform didn’t implement as much of the OpenSocial API as others.

2) Open Social *IS* an Open Source. It has official container implementation, now part of Apache. Anyone can download this and run their own container. Is there an out-of-the-box Facebook container being released that lets anyone get started?

3) Open Social is, or will be, an Open Spec. By that, I mean that Google alone will not control the API spec and what gets included in it (see http://sites.google.com/a/open.....n-Proposal)

Is Facebook going to cede control over the definition of FQL, FBML, FJS, etc a consortium? Google is.

By my account, Open Social is more open than Facebook, hands down. Google overall is far more open. Take Google Gears, a disruptive technology, that is run as an open source project. GWT? Also open source. Pretty much every new Google initiative is either open source, or open spec, or both. Caja, the brainchild of Mark Miller and other researchers, blows FJS away, and could have been held as a closed source advantage for Google containers, yet it is open.

Google has some of the luminaries of the open source community working for them. Openness isn’t just lip-service, it’s part of their culture, a very academic oriented culture.

The only reason people know about BigTable, GFS, and Map/Reduce, is because Google published papers on them. Now, everyone is learning to build out data centers like Google (e.g. HADOOP), so in effect, Google gave away one of their top competitive advantages in scaling.

TC readers try too hard to read Machiavellian or Microsoftian strategies in every Google action.

Open Source seems like a survival measure in the face of chronicly low (or falling) market share. Linux stays alive because it’s always been open source; the only way Apple created interest in MacOS X was to market it as open source to Mac developers. Big Bill would never go so open; he doesn’t have to with Microsoft wield such heavy market-share clout. In that model, you rule over your developers with iron fist. By going open source, you make developers your allies, convincing them you cannot survive without them so they’ll help do your innovation work for you. When a big bopper like Google goes open source, they turn this model on its head and decide just exactly what parts of their empire they will share. After all, most of us learned in Kindergarten that more people like you better whenever you share. ;~)

Yeah, but no one wants to code social applications in JavaScript.

FAIL.

@35 - or rather, you don’t know what i’m talking about.

There’s no point to mention Open Social is open source (in the context of no point to mention mon is woman).

I’m talking about *out*-open, ie., do more, do additionally.. so complete stories, even if less featured.

By complete story, for example, BuddyPress is a complete story, it’s both not F8 nor is it Open Social.

Facebook’s open-source’ing their Facebook Platform doesn’t mean they’re open-source’ing the whole Facebook.com code.

I’m talking about Google to open source the whole Orkut.com source code, instead of the Google-led Open Social reference implementation(s) like the Shindig’s.

In other words, the focus is “out”, not “open”.. or, “more”, not “stronger”.

OpenSocial doesn’t require IFRAME, you can use Caja as well. FBML has the problem in that it’s template language has no mechanism for extension, and no separation of concerns between that which truly needs to pass through FB’s server (access control, etc) and that which amounts to macros. Stuff like fb:swf, or fb:silverlight are useful macros, but you can’t register your own for expansion. What if I want fb:oEmbed, fb:seesmic, etc?

The F8 platform IMHO is too tied into FB architecture and I think if it was developed with peer review of the multiple vendors, it would end up differently. I bet OpenSocial will provide templates in the future, they are too useful not to have, but I bet you’ll see Google get the design right.

Besides, in this day and age, if you’ve got Javascript disabled, you may as well be using Mosaic on a 56k dialup. The user experience difference between an Ajaxified app, and a Web 1.0 “re-render page on every interaction” is leaps and bounds. Mobile only makes the difference worse. It’s not really a pro-F8 argument IMHO.

>There’s no point to mention Open Social is open source (in the context of no point to mention mon is woman).
There’s no point to mention Open Social is open source (in the context of no point to mention mom is woman).

I want Google to open GoogleCheckout.

@38, you’re still confusing.

@Ryan Merket, speak for yourself. There are far more people in love with the Javascript language than PHP or FBML. And if you don’t like JS, than use the language of your choice with the REST APIs. I think the epic fail is going to be FB’s $15 billion valuation as the walled gardens go crumbling down. If they’re lucky, a desperate MSFT will pay through the nose. F8 was a brilliant way to combat MySpace, but ultimately, FB is nothing more than the nth walled in site, need we visit the list of hyped up social networks that came and went since 1997?

I agree with you that F8 has “transformed the valley”, mostly by creating a new form of insipid entrepreneur. About 9 out of 10 people I run into at events tell me they are doing a social network app, with no forethought into business model, user need, or customer. Most of the apps are less interesting than stuff written for fun 18 years ago on LambdaMOO and other programmable MUDs. These “businesses” amount to stuff that is extremely simplistic and can be hacked up in a weekend.

A lucky, tiny, few, get big on FB and stumble into revenues. The vast vast majority fail utterly.

So yes, the valley has been transformed, with lots of entrepreneurial attention spent chasing vampire biting instead of solving real problems. Revolutionary indeed.

I don’t see how open sourcing the platform has anything to do with improving monetization.

I think the FB team has given up and is attempting that its user base do the work for them.

@39: Want fb:seesmic? Last I checked, Seesmic uses Flash, so use fb:swf and build it into your app. I’m fine with something besides F8, but I’d still prefer more of a client/server architecture than what OpenSocial offers. F8 is fairly flexible. Most of an application’s business logic is handled by server-side code or JavaScript - the FBML tags are primarily for interactions with the social networking data or standard UI elements that involve such data.

“Besides, in this day and age, if you’ve got Javascript disabled, you may as well be using Mosaic on a 56k dialup.” Personally, I disagree strongly with this mindset. The Web is about far more than desktop browsers now. For instance, you mentioned mobile - many handsets still can’t handle even basic JavaScript, much less Ajax. And the iframe/script approach also raises questions of security and performance. There’s much more here than simply enabling or disabling JavaScript. JavaScript has its place, but to require it for every social networking application doesn’t sound like best practices to me. At least offer progressive enhancement and graceful degradation - last I checked, that’s not possible with OpenSocial or Google’s Friend Connect.

@42 - agree to disagree, we’re talking about different aspects of “open”, save that the original topic was about “open source”, and I was asking more Google services to be open-sourced, instead of more open-spec’s or stronger-specs. For example, hadoop is open source, bigtable is open-knowledge [in part], not even open-spec [in full], let alone open-sourced.

@44
Let go of XHTML Mobile/WAP phones, please. No one uses the browsers on these slow POS, let’s get real. Yes, many of them don’t have browsers that can run JS. They also suck so bad rendering basic XHTML as to be unusable. Most people I know really never used these mobile browsers except in utter desperation/emergency situations. Going forward, anything not on par with mobile Webkit or Opera simply is a non-starter for serious user usage. Any company wasting precious developer resources on these phones is poised for fail.

I’d personally worry more about a security whole in FBML processing at FB, than someone slipping something through an IFRAME these days. The Open Social approach also offers superior scaling and end user latency than round trips to FB servers for everything. Like I said, I expect Open Social to offer server-side processing, I just think they’ll do a better job of it.

And how can we leave FQL out of this discussion. You really think it’s a good design directly expose FB database schemas/views directly to the app developer? If I were someone looking to implement an F8 container, I’d look at this: http://wiki.developers.faceboo.....FQL_Tables and go “WTF!?” I think it’s clear looking at stuff like FQL and FJS, that it was really done for expediency because they didn’t want to spend more time on a better design (e.g. FJS vs Caja). That is, IMHO, the F8 design represents a compromise from an era when FB had less cash, resources, and experience, and if they had to do it over again now, it would probably be significantly different.

Facebook will launch fbscript

only plat?

the marginal value of apps in minimal.

the marginal value of apps in minimal. Little value created here.