This post was updated at 10:18 a.m. PST to add information about Bebo's plans for OpenSocial.
SAN FRANCISCO--When Bebo co-founder and CEO Michael Birch took the stage in a theater at the Metreon complex here to announce the social network's Open Application Platform, he made the eyebrow-raising claim that the new initiative was, "dare I say it, 100 percent compatible with the Facebook platform."
Bebo representatives had hinted at Facebook compatibility last month when the social network officially joined Google's OpenSocial initiative. The new platform officially goes live on Wednesday night. "There's a little bit of a land grab with social networks," Birch said on Wednesday morning, acknowledging that Bebo, which was founded in 2005, was late to the game.
Creating an application platform, he explained, had been part of Bebo's strategy for quite some time, but then Facebook launched its heavily hyped developer strategy--and that changed the landscape for Bebo. "That kind of changed our course a little bit because we don't want to launch another platform," Birch said. "It just becomes like a format war." Consequently, Bebo's platform uses compatible APIs and markup language so that Facebook applications can be easily converted.
When OpenSocial (which has yet to launch in full) is ready and stable, Birch said, Bebo will add those APIs to its developer arsenal, too. "OpenSocial and the Facebook Platform are clearly different platforms," he said, then added jokingly, "Our lazy development team said they couldn't do both at once."
About 40 developers and companies have created applications for Bebo's platform launch. Among them are NBC Universal, which has created two new applications for the Bebo platform, one based on the hit show The Office, and one for Astrology.com, part of the company's iVillage brand; movie-centric social-media company Flixster, which has created a version of its application for Bebo; and virtual world Gaia Online, which has created the "Gaia OMG" application so members can access the service through Bebo.
"We want the good quality applications to rise to the top," Birch said, demonstrating the ability of Bebo users to rate applications on a five-star scale. The home (or "canvas") pages for Bebo applications are a little more extensive than Facebook's, with custom "skins" that members can then opt to add to their own profile pages. "It is a full-blown profile," Birch explained.
Birch stressed that Bebo is a platform for media consumption in addition to socialization. "We're very much focused on self expression and on content and media," he explained. Indeed, earlier this year, Bebo launched its Open Media Platform so content creators could start a presence on the social network. The Open Application Platform, Birch said, will do for developers what Open Media did for media companies.
For some reason, I had never heard of Qloud until getting a release yesterday about it celebrating the registering of more than a million users via its Facebook application, which launched three months ago. The service hooks up with your iTunes library and scraps together any versions of the songs it can find hosted online, while taking advantage of your iTunes XML file to include such niceties as play counts and the last time you listened a song.
It manages to do this with a (Windows only) plug-in that installs itself on whatever machine your iTunes library resides in. It will periodically keep tabs on your iTunes XML file, which is the one that has all your track names and metadata for playlist organization, play counts, and song data. It then cross references this list with any legally hosted versions of the songs online, and will play them with an embedded player right in the app.
The company says that after installing the plug-in, it takes 15 to 20 minutes for your library to appear. My 50GB library managed to make it in about 12 minutes, and to my surprise, a great deal of it made the cut from metadata to music--although nearly every song was a video from YouTube.
Get a list of your iTunes music aggregated automatically so you can listen to your music in Facebook with Qloud. Just be wary, a lot of the content isn't top-notch like this shaky fan-made concert video.
(Credit: CNET Networks)What was apparent from the get-go with this app is that it's not quite a replacement for some of the other music-streaming services out there, like Orb, MediaMaster (coverage), and Simplify Media (coverage). Many of the fairly popular bands I had in my library had music videos with decent audio, but the majority were live recordings from concerts made by fans. This translates to bad video, and even worse audio. Audiophiles will not be pleased, nor will those who enjoy a particular version of a song that's on their library, be it live or an alternate studio recording.
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