Friday, October 03, 2008

SocialTimes.com

SocialTimes.com

Friendster Launches Support for Facebook Applications

Posted: 03 Oct 2008 08:01 AM CDT

In a move signifying the influence of the Facebook platform in the social web, Friendster has announced that it has deployed supporter for the Facebook platform. Developers can now choose between the Facebook Platform, OpenSocial, or Friendster’s API to launch applications on the platform. Whether or not Facebook developers will actually choose to launch on Friendster is unknown but it just became a whole lot easier.

This appears to be the first use of Facebook’s open-source platform offering that they released earlier this year. It appears that launching your Facebook application will be as simple as requesting a new API Key from Friendster. Developers can learn more by visiting http://www.friendster.com/developer. This is a big win for Facebook who has decided to avoid the OpenSocial standard for the time being, instead choosing to focus on expanding their existing platform offerings.

In addition to choosing not to use OpenSocial, Facebook has decided to launch Facebook Connect instead of partnering with Google on their Friend Connect product. While none of the distributed login services offered by any of the platforms have been successful at spreading, Facebook and Google have been extremely slow in rolling out their new services.

While Bebo was the first to implement Facebook standards for applications, Friendster is the first to release Facebook support using their open-source platform. It will be interesting to see if the trend continues to other social networks. This is a big announcement for both Friendster and Facebook.

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