Facebook Platform Versus Google OpenSocial
Nobody likes a one-sided race: our competitive spirits take a beating at the unfairness of it all. Just when it looked like Facebook was going to single-handedly make a break for the cookie jar and steal all the cookies, competition popped up in the form of the OpenSocial Application Programming Interface (API). It’s important to take a moment to understand what that means to you, the would-be Facebook developer, so that you can feel secure in your decision to write apps for this Platform.
What Exactly Is OpenSocial?
With much fanfare, Google, along with a community of websites and developers, launched OpenSocial on November 1, 2007. Now that you have the gist of Facebook Platform, think about how much more powerful it would be if your Facebook apps could run inside lots of other websites too. The promise of OpenSocial is that you can build an app that runs on an ever growing list of sites including, MySpace, My Yahoo!, iGoogle, Friendster, h5, orkut, and others with little to no modification, giving you a potential audience of 600 million users (or three times the size of Facebook, though it should be noted that installation on one of those doesn’t guarantee or even cross-promote installation on others, and so the network effect of the social graph is tempered). Unlike Facebook Platform, you don’t need to learn a proprietary markup language. The OpenSocial API includes three major areas of functionality, accessible through both JavaScript ...