api

Friendster has fully launched its developer platform with more than 180 applications available to its 56 million registered users, the social-networking site said Tuesday.

The company first announced the platform on October 25.

The developer platform was initially piloted by some well-known names in the widget world: Slide, RockYou, Imeem, Jangl, Clearspring, and Gbox. Companies and individual developers participating in the program are allowed to advertise anywhere in the application space and keep all revenue.

According to the social network, the platform is going to be as "open" as possible to make it easy for applications designed for … Read more

Business social network LinkedIn has given itself a New Year's makeover a few weeks early: the site has announced a home page redesign and new features, and has simultaneously launched a developer program that it calls "InApps."

For LinkedIn, which says that it recently passed 17 million user accounts, this move comes at a time when some observers are saying that business social networks are about to take off in a big way. The redesigned home page has not gone fully live, but is now accessible to logged-in LinkedIn members on a beta page. Included among the … Read more

Silicon Alley Insider editor Peter Kafka had the opportunity for some cocktail conversation with Facebook investor and board member Jim Breyer of Accel Partners on Thursday night, and he had some interesting news to report.

Most intriguing is the fact that Breyer refused to outlaw a Facebook partnership with OpenSocial, the Google-created social networking platform that's managed to steal a whole lot of Valley buzz from Facebook right as it gears up to make a major advertising announcement.

"Jim said that the company isn't philosophically opposed to what Google is trying to do, and that its business … Read more

The Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka reported Thursday morning that he heard MySpace will be announcing a partnership with Google's new social-networking project, OpenSocial--potentially before the end of the day.

MySpace, which already has its search and advertising functions powered by Google, has not yet responded to requests for comment.

If true, this would probably be a good thing for MySpace, which has lost its place in the social media spotlight to Facebook (though it still leads in traffic and membership) and is struggling to play catch-up by working on a developer platform strategy that may not see … Read more

When Google announced that its new social-networking initiative would extend to any site that wanted to participate, the land grab for the social Web's attention just got a whole lot more intense.

In a move that was anticipated for weeks, Google has unveiled a set of application program interfaces (APIs) that allow third-party programmers to build widgets that take advantage of personal data and profile connections on a social-networking site. But instead of limiting the project to its own social-networking property, Orkut, Google has invited other sites along for the ride--including LinkedIn, Hi5, Plaxo, Ning, and Friendster.

Read the … Read more

Borrowing a page from Sun's Java playbook, Google is announcing a way for programmers to build social applications for multiple Web sites at once.

Google's version of this "write once run anywhere" concept is called OpenSocial, a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) that will enable developers to create applications for social networks, blogs and any Web sites that accept the OpenSocial code. Currently, developers have to write new programs for each site, even if the functionality will be the same on each site.

This initiative "marks the first time that multiple social networks … Read more

Though almost everything Google touches seems to turn to gold, there is one project that never quite became ubiquitous (at least here in the U.S.). Orkut may have found a following in Brazil and Asia, but I don't know anyone who uses the service. As Erick Schonfeld reports in TechCrunch, that may be about to change.

Known internally as Maka-Maka, the project will provide a means for all of Google's existing applications to work together within a social-networking landscape. Google is also building a series of APIs that will allow developers to integrate their own applications into the Google universe.

… Read more

Business social network LinkedIn is following in Facebook's footsteps and opening up an application programming interface (API) to allow third-party developers to contribute to the site. But Dan Nye, the company's CEO, recently spoke with the New York Times' Saul Hansell and explained that it's going to be limited, in the interest of keeping things professional.

"We're not going to have people sending electronic hamburgers to each other," Nye told the Times, in a not-so-subtle reference to the utter ridiculousness of many Facebook developer applications.

Rather, LinkedIn's platform API will invite developers, who … Read more