Comments for Will Facebook Join OpenSocial? R/WW Readers Split 50/50!

Will Facebook Join OpenSocial? R/WW Readers Split 50/50!

2007-11-09T20:48:27Z

This week's poll asks: will Facebook join Google's OpenSocial? The results so far:

Yes 45%
No 46%
Open What? 9%

From the comments on our original post, the 'Yes' camp thinks the benefits include Facebook getting more widgets and developers. Other comments: Timoth√©e said that "Web 2.0 needs normalisation". MikeB asked: "how long can it [Facebook] continue to be a walled garden?". Kiran thinks that "it would be a mistake in long run if they [FB] don't conform to the standards."

In the 'No' camp, Dennis Howlett pointed out that it's a moot point "until identity management and interoperability are clarified [...]". Jon Burg said "there's no reason for Facebook to open the exit doors." Sean Tierney commented that Facebook will "join when it's in their best interest to do so and right now it doesn't make sense." Donv69 said that "Facebook is still too young to start making such moves. Google could easily cripple them using OpenSocial."

So, some excellent pros and cons mentioned in the comments. Also see Marshall Kirkpatrick's analysis of OpenSocial and Josh Catone's thoughts on why Facebook doesn't need OpenSocial.

But let's see if we can break the deadlock. We've all had over a week now to analyze OpenSocial and see how Facebook responded to the pressure (it unveiled a new ad network). So tell us what you think in the poll below:

Comment from Alexander Sicular on 2007-11-09

2007-11-09T22:52:07Z

I was at the Philadelphia Facebook Garage last night, 08 NOV 2007. Dave Fetterman, the guy who wrote facebooks app framework, said that they were thinking about it and studying opensocial. Overall he was a bit coy but one quote was "We will make the best decision for our users." In the end he politely recommended people use the facebook platform, duh.

Personally, I do not doubt that facebook will support opensocial. It is in their interest to do so. Regardless, Applications will need to take advantage of facebooks stack to be impressive enough to facebooks users. In that vein, Dave enlightened us as to some background efforts at facebook to allow developers to use the backend facebook platform itself for computational processes. Dave specifically mentioned a service 'like s3' but not exactly s3. A specific example he cited was the case of large list intersection. IE: Users are connected to things (he used restaurants) and as an app developer you are interested in the intersection of a user and his/her friends and the things they have in common. To do this kind of processing now you need to pipe the data to your compute nodes and pipe the results back. The new methodology would allow for the results to be calculated on facebooks stack via an exposed api. Sounds grand to me.

Comment from Don Jones on 2007-11-10

2007-11-10T21:43:26Z

They'll join it - to try and be an island with Google all around you? That would not be a long-term survival strategy...I'm sure their venture capital investors are very involved in the decision on a BOD level.