Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Time for that weekly Facebook update you and three other people have been waiting for. Upon reading through the reaction to today’s rumor that Facebook is about to make their platform open source, a lot of developers that have been working with Opensocial are claiming that it’s good for widgets, but not for apps.

MySpace, Facebook’s top competitor, already is signed up with Google’s Opensocial, along with Yahoo. In fact, as was reported a couple of weeks ago by Vasanth Sridharan, some developers have been gravitating toward Opensocial at the expense of Facebook. Undoubtedly, reports such as these have likely compelled Facebook to open up.

But Facebook is not joining Opensocial. Rather, they are opening up the code to any developer that wishes to use it, and opening up existing Facebook apps to be more easily transferred to other social sites.

Most importantly is that they are openly taking on Google, MySpace, and Opensocial. If you don’t want to join ‘em, beat ‘em. Facebook is counting on dissatisfaction by developers with the Opensocial platform, especially when it comes to serious apps. Obviously, if the Facebook platform becomes the platform of choice for developers, then Facebook will get the lion’s share of top-quality apps that will allow it to keep growing. One very nice thing about having your own platform is that developers can’t help but cater their apps directly to your network. Developers will, in all likelihood, start with Facebook in mind and then use the open source to transfer their app to other networks, like Bebo already does.

I’ve been gauging the reaction to Facebook’s announcement amongst a handful of developers, and there is a lot of concern that Opensocial isn’t really impressing a lot of people right now. As one commenter named John on TechCrunch said, “OpenSocial is just awful to develop for. The quality of apps and the volume of users per unit of dev cost on the two platforms speaks for itself. Developing on the client side alone is a broken scenario for the most part…”

However, there have been a lot of complaints lately that Facebook apps are pretty much useless. Good for a smile, but little else.

But they’re smart to strike while the iron’s hot. What Facebook is giving up by allowing its apps to be transferred to other social networks they are gaining by making their platform preferred once again, over Opensocial. Seems like a winning tactic for now, but they are sacrificing a lot of control of their garden, and need to have faith that the platform they’ve built will continue to attract new users. While Facebook gets lots of attention, it must be remembered that they still lag behind MySpace when it comes to traffic, and by quite a large margin. While we’ve all been ignoring MySpace, and while their growth has stagnated, there’s still a lot of traffic going in and out of that site, and Opensocial is the app platform they’ve signed on with.

Thanks to Michael Arrington at Techcrunch and Vasanth Sridharan at Silicon Alley for the stories and quotes.

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook platform, opensocial, myspace