facebook

Facebook heading for the open (source) road?

Just when you thought the landscape of social-networking developer APIs couldn't get any more complicated, here comes another curveball.

Facebook will reportedly open-source the code for its application platform, according to TechCrunch. The announcement may be just days away.

Facebook representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

It makes sense to do it now: the Facebook Platform just hit its one-year anniversary, and while it remains extraordinarily popular, developers have found an alternative in OpenSocial. Created by Google and then spun off into a nonprofit organization, OpenSocial is an open-source developer standard that any participating social site … Read more

Facebook To Open Source Facebook Platform?

TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook will open source it's Facebook Platform (no official word yet on if this is true or what license it will be available under.)

While some see this as a response to OpenSocial and other data movement issues, I see this as a direct attempt at market domination. Facebook already has the dominant site, by open-sourcing the platform it gets ubiquity without hurting monetization.

This move would also take some of the pressure of scaling the architecture and dealing with APIs that may/may not affect the service. It seems like a win/win for … Read more

Some perspective on Twitter and its brethren

The obsession with the ups and downs of Twitter among my friends has generated a great deal of bloviation, including my own. On a slow news weekend, Twitter's performance problems are fodder for a bit of theater and for getting some daily keyboard exercise.

The image below is meant to bring some perspective to the Twittersphere. On one hand, Twitter navel gazing (or any other navel gazing) is a waste of resources in the context of what is going on in the world. On the other hand, Twitter and its brethren are becoming viable communications vehicles for spreading the &… Read more

Control BitTorrent downloads from Facebook with Morrent

So much for Scrabulous being an end-all diversion on Facebook. Try Morrent instead, a simple tie-in to the popular BitTorrent software uTorrent that runs right in Facebook (read: sans software) and lets you monitor your torrent downloads and uploads from wherever.

Aimed mainly at folks who want to check up on their downloads at work or away from their primary machines, Morrent is more than just a convenient status window--it doubles as a remote control. You can pause and re-prioritize downloads. You can also start downloading new torrents by uploading them back to your home machine.

While the same results … Read more

Facebook adds more services to Mini-Feed

Facebook users can now import YouTube, StumbleUpon, Pandora, Hulu, Last.fm, and Google Reader into the social network's Mini-Feed.

By doing this, Facebook users will be opening up their actions at these sites to their friends. The service, which was announced on Facebook's blog on Friday, is similar to one offered by FriendFeed.

Facebook had already included Flickr, Picasa, Digg, Yelp, and Del.icio.us. in Mini-Feed. Facebook executives have said that it intends to focus on adding data from third-party sites.

Where we've got Belmont Fever

Tech goddess Veronica Belmont joins us on the show today and dishes her thoughts on the $200,000,000 Pac-Man movie, video games in Las Vegas, nebulous Apple line-ups, and her quasi defunct Make Out Club profile. EPISODE 106 Download today's podcast

Google's David Glazer expects to make peace with Facebook

On Friday's Gillmor Gang podcast, Google's point person on Friend Connect, David Glazer, took questions from the gang, which included Steve, Marc Canter, Robert Anderson, Mike Arrington, Dana Gardner, and myself.

Much of the conversation centered on Facebook's suspended participation in Google Friend Connect. Glazer said he expects Facebook and Google to make peace but didn't want to give a time frame for a resolution.

Regarding efforts by Google, Facebook, and MySpace to provide some element of data portability, Glazer said they are complementary, based on what is known about the APIs so far, which isn'… Read more

Social gaming coming into its own

SAN FRANCISCO--When you're one of the earliest adopters of a new technology, or one of the first companies into a new space, you tend to be very bullish on its future.

That energy was very much in evidence Thursday at InterPlay, the first-ever conference solely devoted to social gaming.

If you're not familiar with the concept of social gaming--small, casual game applications designed to be played on social networks like Facebook--you soon will be. That's because there is a lot of interest--and a growing amount of venture capital--being focused on the young space.

Examples of the early … Read more

Zuckerberg: Facebook founder, Harvard dropout...and koala-eating jet-setter?

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, the youngest person ever to score a spot on Forbes magazine's annual list of billionaires, is known as a quiet, businesslike fellow.

Self-confident, definitely. Arrogant, possibly. It'd still be a stretch to imagine him partying on yachts, scheming his way into secret societies, and creating popular Web projects so that he could hook up with more girls. But according to a tipster to media gossip blog Gawker, that's what's detailed in Face Off, a forthcoming book that purports to be written by Bringing Down The House author Ben Mezrich.

"They dined … Read more