Bebo joins OpenSocial, eyes Facebook applications

Social-networking site Bebo, which has made its most significant inroads among young people in the United Kingdom, is set to announce that it has joined Google's OpenSocial project, joining the ranks of MySpace.com, Imeem, LinkedIn, Six Apart, and a laundry list of other participants that seems to encompass any social-networking site that isn't Facebook.

Additionally, Bebo plans to soon release an application programming interface (API) later this year that will "enable Facebook developers to easily bring their applications to the Bebo community," a Bebo representative said Thursday. It's not yet clear what this really means, as Bebo, which has hinted at more major announcements over the next two months, has not yet issued a full news release to elaborate.

I speculate that this API will give developers a shortcut in converting the markup language of a Facebook application into a Bebo-only platform application. But if it were connected to OpenSocial, that'd be really interesting: an easy "jailbreak" to turn a Facebook application into a more universal OpenSocial application could create a lot of opportunities.

As well as a lot of problems.

[Jesse Chan]

OpenSocial is a new platform

Google laid the hammer down by announcing OpenSocial. For those out there that thought that Facebook was the next big thing and would be Google?s eventual downfall, think again. Google has done it again, but abstracting themselves from the social network wars: http://fishtrain.com/2007/11/01/opensocial-social-unification/