The Social

Social-network builder Ning has deployed its support for developer applications for OpenSocial, something that it has been planning to do since Google kick-started the open-source project nearly a year ago. (It is now an independent organization.)

A Ning profile with the OpenSocial 'BuddyPoke' app added.

(Credit: Ning)

As part of the launch, a directory of 30 applications will be available for Ning members to embed in their profiles, which they use for any of the hundreds of thousands of networks created with Ning. They'll have variable "skins" to adopt the design of the profile around them and blend in, the company has said. Incorporation into the OpenSocial app directory on Ning will be selective, so it won't be a developer free-for-all.

A few OpenSocial apps had gone live on Ning in beta over the past year, including one from social music service Last.fm (which is owned by CNET News publisher CBS Interactive).

You still can't embed OpenSocial apps on Ning networks, just profiles--but that will change, CEO Gina Bianchini said to CNET News, when future versions of OpenSocial (the current one is 0.7) are developed. "In its first incarnation, it looks and feels a lot like what you'd be doing on a MySpace profile or on a Facebook profile in terms of adding apps," she explained, "but what's unique about us is that we have half a million social networks and they'll want an app for their network as well."

From the Future of Web Apps conference in London, Google engineer Kevin Marks praised the incorporation of Ning into OpenSocial, which he helped build. "The nice thing about Ning is that we're going from about 100 social networks to about 500,000 social networks," Marks said to CNET News.

The question still remains, though as to whether Ning would opt to support Facebook applications--still not compatible with OpenSocial--the way social network Friendster has.

"We'd love to support Facebook apps," said Bianchini, who co-founded Ning with veteran entrepreneur Marc Andreessen. "Right now, Facebook hasn't neccessarily set it up in a really clear, programmatic way...(Facebook) has talked about it, then came back from it, and it's a little bit in limbo right now in terms of really what and how they would want other social networks to support Facebook apps."

Developers who have created applications for Facebook's platform can now bring them over to social network Friendster. This means that Friendster supports both Facebook's code and OpenSocial, the standard created by Google for social-network widgets.

"Friendster's support of both the Facebook and OpenSocial platforms is a big win for business and individual developers, as well as for Friendster users," David Jones, vice president of global marketing for Friendster, said in a release. "For the developers that have invested resources in developing and launching a Facebook app, Friendster has now made it very easy for them to 'port' these applications to Friendster...For Web 2.0 companies that have developed apps using Facebook and OpenSocial APIs, they now have the flexibility to choose between approaches when launching applications on Friendster."

Another social network, Bebo, now owned by AOL, announced that it would implement support for Facebook's platform late last year. Friendster marketing director Jeff Roberto told CNET News that Friendster entered into a licensing agreement with Facebook, which has since made most of its developer platform open source.

Could another social network do the same? Probably. "With an open platform, it's quite possible that others will embrace it," Roberto said.

Long before Facebook was a household word, Friendster was the first big social-networking site to take off in the U.S. But in 2004, plagued by technical problems, Friendster lost significant ground to MySpace (now owned by News Corp.) and later Facebook.

Since then, it's had quite a reincarnation. Friendster estimates that 78 percent of its 80 million users, like the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, do not use Facebook. If so, it would be to a developer's advantage to make an app available on both platforms.

In August, Friendster raised $20 million in venture funding and hired former Google employee Richard Kimber as CEO. Last December, it debuted its developer platform, and in September released OpenSocial support.

Social network Hi5 has launched a site translation project, a week after the announcement that the company had created a "crowdsourced translation" app for use on the OpenSocial developer platform and several months after it initially announced plans for translation.

The site is now available not only in American English and the two dozen languages that Hi5 had previously translated it into (not through community efforts), but now also in Catalan, Danish, British English, Finnish, Hindi, Macedonian, Slovakian, Mexican Spanish, Colombian Spanish, and Swedish. These translations were generated by community participation and verified by translation service Lionbridge. Later in October, Hi5 plans to launch translated versions of the site in Albanian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Croatian, French, Maltese, Norwegian, Serbian, and several other Spanish dialects.

"The power of this program to deliver localized versions of our product has exceeded our own high expectations," founder and CEO Ramu Yalamanchi said in a release. "It is amazing to see the energy and enthusiasm of our global user community in action, taking our site into new languages and geographies that we otherwise wouldn't have the resources to address."

Hi5 is headquartered in San Francisco, but a plurality of its 56 million users come from Latin American countries.

This post was updated at 1:19 p.m. PT to note the number of languages into which Hi5 is already translated.

Social network Hi5 plans to announce on Thursday that it has built a developer application with the Google-created OpenSocial standard that "crowdsources" language translation.

This makes it possible for OpenSocial-compatible social networks or applications to let their users work to translate a site or application's text and interface into more languages, in turn making it easier for the service to have broader geographic reach. The translation app will be implemented on Hi5, a social network that was founded in San Francisco but is most popular in Spanish-speaking countries, as well as its own developer platform, and is open for more developers to use as well through OpenSocial.

Hi5's own site is already available in two dozen languages.

One big player in the social-app space that plans to use Hi5's translation code is iLike, a music service that has become popular largely through applications for platforms from Facebook to Apple's iTunes, and hopes to see its user base distributed around the world as well as across the Web. Another is RockYou, the "app factory" behind some of the most popular applications created with the Facebook and OpenSocial standards.

"As the leading music provider on hi5, we're excited to know that hi5's crowdsourcing service would expand iLike's reach internationally, helping music spread among fans from different languages, geographies and cultures," iLike CEO Ali Partovi said in a release.

The concept of crowdsourcing language translations caught fire when Facebook started enlisting volunteer members to help with the effort through an application on its own platform called Translation. The Hi5 application will, in effect, do the same thing for the OpenSocial platform.

Google built OpenSocial as a universal standard for social-network applications, and has since gained the following of almost every social site except for Facebook, which continues to use its own platform. Earlier this year, OpenSocial was spun off into a nonprofit organization separate from Google.

What does the iPhone 3G have to do with the future of social platforms like Facebook and OpenSocial? A lot, actually.

It's because of the iPhone App Store, the add-on to the iTunes Store that opened its doors on Thursday in anticipation of the new device and its iPhone 2.0 software.

With more than 550 third-party applications available at launch, Apple's new mini marketplace means that for the first time since the social-application craze started more than a year ago, the hottest new trend has nothing to do with Web-based networks.

The iPhone App Store, the add-on to the iTunes Store, made its debut Thursday in anticipation of the iPhone 3G's release Friday.

(Credit: Apple)

"(The iPhone is) a device that's made for 'social,'" said Bart Decrem, a veteran of browsers Firefox and Flock who went on to found Tapulous, a start-up firm that has released three iPhone games in the App Store and plans to roll out more. "This is a device that's always connected, that's always on you. It knows where you are, you can take pictures with it, and you can send messages with it."

The new iPhone: it's pretty, it's shiny, it's versatile, and owners rarely leave it out of their sight. The implication for Facebook, as well as open-source social network platform OpenSocial, is that if developers see more compelling reasons to build software for the iPhone instead, they could jump ship.

And there's a big reason: money.

It's true that there is not an obvious path to jump from one to the other. Traditionally, the Web development space has been distinctly separate from the tight-knit community of Mac developers, said developer Jesse Farmer, who writes about both on the 20bits blog. "There's cultural differences and technical differences. People who develop software for social platforms tend to come from the Web world. They tend to travel in their own social circles," he explained.

When it comes to the App Store, Farmer said the first ones to the table "are the people who are really into that stuff. The Mac developers are going to be the first ones there, mostly because developing for the iPhone is going to be a lot like developing for the Mac."

The money factor
There might be an apples-and-oranges vibe when it comes to comparing social-platform developers with iPhone developers, but the money factor could easily make some of them willing to bridge the gap.

For small-time developers, it's become increasingly tough to make a buck or two from applications on Facebook's platform, where the easiest route to cash is ad impressions. The space has become dominated by half-billion-dollar firms like Slide and RockYou, something that Farmer has pointed out in his analyses of developer discontent.

"If you've already succeeded on Facebook, OpenSocial, or whatever, there's really no reason to (switch)," Farmer said of iPhone development. Thing is, there are thousands upon thousands of developers who haven't succeeded, or who enjoyed only flash-in-the-pan success. "People who are sort of disillusioned with social networks and haven't found a way to succeed...I can see them moving over and trying it out."

The iPhone App Store is structured completely differently, and that might be appealing. True, there are barriers to entry: a fee to join the developer program, and selectivity when it comes to apps that wind up in the store. But that could get a thumbs-up from developers who grew tired of the saturation of Zombie Bite-type games on Facebook's platform.

"It's disruptive in the way that going from DOS to Windows was disruptive," Tapulous' Decrem said. "That means that there are tremendous new opportunities, and entire new classes of applications and companies will come into existence." He said that with the iPhone 1.0 software, which required a "jailbreaking" hack to be able to install third-party applications, the games released by Tapulous had already seen a million installs. In other words, people want this stuff.

And here's the real kicker: the creators of iPhone applications can charge a fee for downloads, thus creating a way to make money that's unheard of on free-for-all social-network platforms. Of the 552 applications in the App Store at launch, 417 of them are paid downloads, one of them costing a whopping $69.99. (That'd be ForeFlight, which provides runway and airport data for airline pilots.)

"Apple has built payments directly into the app distribution model in a way that is already comfortable and familiar to over 100 million iPod users," said Eric Litman, whose new start-up Medialets also hopes to cash in on the iPhone developer gold rush. "Buying and installing an iPhone app feels very similar to buying a song through iTunes, and that familiarity is undoubtedly going to work to the advantage of all developers on the platform."

Investment bank Piper Jaffray estimated last month that the iPhone App Store could be a billion-dollar business by 2009, and that nearly 90 million people worldwide could own compatible iPhone and iPod Touch devices by the end of that year. That's a bigger audience than Facebook has now--though it should be noted that the number is probably optimistic. And the lower price point for the new iPhone 3G, just $199 for the lower-end model, means that its reputation as a geek fetish toy will probably go away soon. Charging five bucks for an application could bring in some real dollars.

Advertising industry ready to jump in
But even if a developer is committed to distributing his or her iPhone applications for free, the ad industry is already chomping at the bit. That's in stark contrast to the debut of the Facebook platform, where many developers simply used Google's AdSense at the start, and it wasn't until months later that Facebook application ad networks started to pop up. (Now they're everywhere.)

"There is a lot of ad agency excitement right now about the iPhone, the iPhone 3G, and advertising possibilities on the iPhone," said Greg Yardley, founder of iPhone ad start-up Pinch Media. "I know that inventory just on regular Web pages optimized for the iPhone is selling fast."

There's still no concrete reason to believe that advertising on the iPhone will work much better than advertising on a social network, just a lot of statistics and guesswork.

"Mobile has been the redheaded stepchild of advertising for a long time, simply because the tracking has been really bad, and traditionally, the targeting has been really bad," Yardley said. "Now that the iPhone is going out there, there are more interesting ad opportunities. I think we're going to see an increase in spend, but it's not going to be a flip of a switch. You're always going to get a few agencies that are going to get out there and do interesting things, but those agencies were going to do interesting things, anyway."

Even if the money's not as solid as it purports to be, the promise is there, and that's going to be enough to make some developers shift the focus from their Facebook or OpenSocial applications to Apple's shiny device. It's guaranteed to shake things up, at the very least. "Not only will app developers move to the iPhone, I think we'll see the social platforms themselves move there," Litman said. "The iPhone is an inherently social device, in many ways even more so than social-networking platforms."

There's a lot of big dreaming, but right now, the biggest priority is getting used to the new landscape. When asked what he planned to do first after the iPhone 3G launched, Yardley said, "We have to make sure our servers stay up."

Click here for CNET News' complete iPhone 3G coverage.

AOL will officially support OpenSocial, the developer standard created by Google for social-networking applications. The announcement was hinted at by Google Director of Engineering David Glazer in a speech at the Google I/O conference Wednesday.

The online service-turned-media brand will join pretty much every big player in online media that isn't Facebook: MySpace and Yahoo, for example, were major partners when Google spun OpenSocial off into its own nonprofit organization.

It's not a surprise: Bebo, the social network acquired by AOL earlier this year, already supports OpenSocial, and is being tightly integrated into other AOL communication properties like AIM and ICQ.

More details are forthcoming. AOL is not issuing a formal press release, representatives told CNET News.com Wednesday. The announcement will be in the form of a post on the OpenSocial blog later in the day.

As rumored earlier, Facebook will indeed be announcing an open-source project for its developer platform. The social network released a statement Tuesday to clarify the gossip--while still not offering much in the way of detail.

"We're working on an open-source initiative that is meant to help application developers better understand Facebook Platform and more easily build applications, whether it's by running their own test servers, building tools, or optimizing their applications," a statement from Facebook read.

"As Facebook Platform continues to mature, open-sourcing the infrastructure behind it is a natural step so developers can build richer social applications and share what they've learned with the ecosystem," the statement continued. "Additional details will be released soon."

So it's still not clear as to just how extensive the open-source project, which TechCrunch says is called "fbOpen," will be: whether the entire platform will become an open-source environment or whether there will simply be more open-source principles scattered throughout the technology.

Regardless, this will likely be framed as a grassroots, pro-developer move at a time when some vocal developers have criticized Facebook for being too "corporate."

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 can use. Most of the big players in the scene, including MySpace, LinkedIn, and Google's Orkut, are on board--but not Facebook.

Facebook's image in the eyes of the "open Web" community also took a hit when popular blogger Robert Scoble said his account had been banned when he tried to export his Facebook contacts to Plaxo.

Facebook, however, has shown signs of wanting to expand its code beyond its own platform: Bebo, the social network that was acquired by AOL earlier this year, has a platform that accepts Facebook applications in addition to OpenSocial ones, and it seems logical that this would eventually reach sites other than Bebo.

Facebook announced earlier this month that it would be evolving its developer API into "Facebook Connect," a way to sync Facebook accounts with other sites like Digg. The announcement came within days of MySpace's "Data Availability" and Google's "Friend Connect," a set of new projects hinting that social-networking properties aren't just going to be standalone sites anymore.

But the question remains, especially given the scant detail of the latest rumor, about whether "open source" means truly open source or some variety of "extensible." Facebook has been redefining a whole lot of what we think about the Web, so this may be no exception.

Bebo's core demographic might be teens and young adults in the U.K., but President Joanna Shields said that now that the social network's acquisition by AOL is complete, it's time to start expanding. Now that she's in charge of AOL's "People Networks" division, which encompasses Bebo as well as the AIM and ICQ instant-messaging services, her goal is to expand the service's reach and bring it up to par with bigger rivals like Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace.

"If you look at Bebo (a year ago) it was much more of a youth brand," Shields said in an interview with CNET News.com Monday. "It looked younger, it had a younger feel to it, but over the course of my time here, over 18 months, we've evolved the DNA of the site, we've matured it." While the Bebo of the U.K. and Ireland will retain a youth vibe, the feel will be much more universal when it "expands into new markets," per Shields.

Additionally, as Bebo creeps into new geographic territories, advertisements will be served by AOL's Platform A technology, not by current ad partner Yahoo. Bebo's U.S. site will also transition from Yahoo to AOL ads.

"In each new market we go into, of course now that we have this extraordinary technology, we will launch with Platform A," Shields said.

Yahoo will continue to serve Bebo ads in three regions. "We have a very positive relationship with Yahoo in the U.K., Ireland, and Australia," Shields explained. "That current relationship goes until the end of 2009." She declined to specify what the plan would be after that, but she did say that she expects Bebo to be exempt from the difficulties some other social sites have on the monetization front because of its focus on media consumption rather than just communication.

"Sending an ad to someone who's communicating is quite different from someone that is consuming entertainment," she said, mentioning Bebo's original video programming as well as its "Open Media" platform, which partners with companies like MTV Networks, the BBC, and ESPN. "There's no surprise that we ended up with a media company, or a company with a media heritage, given the part of the spectrum of social networking where we reside, the category we tried to create--a social media network."

Shields said it's too early in the AOL ownership to be able to gauge whether Bebo would be launching a data portability project like Facebook's Facebook Connect or MySpace's Data Availability. "I'm a firm believer that you've got to be open," she hinted. With regard to further developer-related announcements, she explained, "We've been through this quiet period through the acquisitions...We haven't yet socialized those discussions with the AOL folks because we've been operating independently."

Bebo's application platform is notable because it's compatible with both the OpenSocial standard and Facebook's application code.

But right now the mantra is expansion first. "My goal and the goal of our team is to expand distribution," she explained, "and to build and to expose the Bebo experience to more and more territories."