The Inquisitr » open-social

Facebook Platform a Claytons Open Source Effort?

Duncan Riley — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 10:12:37 +0000

Ive received two emails from Bob Bickel suggesting that Facebook’s decision to open source its platform is a claytons effort. Bob suggested that I print them in full so I have:

“Facebook continues to look like the Microsoft of the Social Networking industry with this latest move of creating an open source project — fbOpen. Open, but not really.

The license they chose is CPAL, and there is an excellent review of what this means at here. The poison pill in this license agreement is that anyone using the Facebook code as part of something else, and puts that up on a website, would need to make all of the code open source. So if MySpace used this code to support Facebook applications, then MySpace would have to open source their entire platform (unless Facebook cuts a private deal with them).

This says that Facebook only wants developers to see the code for the sole purpose of making Facebook applications that run on Facebook.

Until further clarification from Facebook, Ringside will keep our Facebook API implementation free from any of this viral CPAL code that Facebook has released. The LGPL license we use lets anyone use and embed our Facebook API, JS, FQL and FBML implementations in whatever way they want without any obligations, other than contributing any code changes they make back to the community.

My suggestion is to let your voice be heard by Facebook to make their platform true open source either with LGPL or with Apache license, as the Open Social reference implementation Shindig does. We had all expected more from Facebook, and this is truly disappointing.

Then a follow up email:

I just got a call from Ami Vora of Facebook, who has corrected me on following the advice of this article — which I referenced in my earlier email below to you today regarding Facebook’s open source platform announcement. Apparently, the CPAL only applies to open sourcing the files that are changed. So if a class is extended, or the database access logic is put into an API call, then that gets open sourced under the CPAL as well.

Facebook’s use of the CPAL open source license is a step in the right direction:

Upside: The upside is that we love the fact that the community is required to donate changes back to the open source project. This is the reason we use the LGPL at Ringside.

Downside: The downside of the CPAL is the requirement to give attribution. This means a little Facebook badge comes up on all websites that use the Facebook software. This makes sense from a Facebook perspective because it helps them to build their brand in return for donating their software. On the other hand, if every open source project required this, then there would be nothing on web pages except logos — Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Tomcat, JBoss, Spring, Zimbra, Postgres, Lucene, MediaWiki, Firefox, etc., etc.

It will be interesting to see if MySpace is anxious enough to run the 26,000 Facebook Applications on their social network to actually put up a little Facebook logo on their website…”

Food for thought.

The Race To Social Network 2.0

Duncan Riley — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 05:33:05 +0000

October 2009: Matthew logs onto his social aggregation service. In front of him appears everything his friends have been doing across every different social networking service. He decides that he needs to write a few blog posts, upload some photos, and comment on a few threads. He clicks on the menu in his aggregation service and off he goes, uploading photos to MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, Picasa Web Albums, .Mac and Bebo all from the one screen. Then there’s that party he wants to invite people to: he sets up an event and adds the friends he wants to invite. Details of the party and invites are posted on evite, Socializr and Facebook, with RSVPs from all being tracked by the aggregator.

Does this sound like any service available today? It doesn’t, and yet this is the social network of tomorrow, social network 2.0.

There’s been a lot of talk around FriendFeed being the next Google, and yet it’s not quite there yet. FriendFeed aggregates the data in, but so far the only place you can post out of FriendFeed is Twitter. FriendFeed is however continually evolving and will change in time. The guys running FriendFeed are smart (and ex-Googlers as well) so they will already know that social network 2.0 is the end game. The bigger question though is can they get there in time?

Google is still the 1000 pound gorilla

The only company that has come close to meeting the description above is Google with the yet unlaunched Socialstream. The video below shows how one central network can be used as the hub for external services, perhaps not perfectly, but the content generation outwards is there. Google’s Friend Connect and Open Social is all about laying a common data foundation for a service like Socialstream. Google knows it can’t win social networks 1.0, but it’s well placed to become the two-way social aggregation tool of the future.

Competition

We know that the two main players in the race to social network 2.0 are Google and FriendFeed, but as yet we don’t know who else is aiming to deliver in this space. I’d suggest that Facebook and MySpace in particular are not going to sit back and allow Google to create an two way aggregation hub without themselves being in the race. We’re seeing the start of the cold war between Google and Facebook now, with Facebook blocking access to Google’s Friend Connect service. Facebook claims the reason is privacy but ultimately what Friend Connect represents is the dawn of the aggregation services, the ability to pull and push information to and from multiple social networks. MySpace has thrown its weight behind Open Social, but is absent from Friend Connect. Could MySpace see Friend Connect as the start of the broader threat from Google?

My guess is that Facebook is trying to group as many startups around a compatible layer, perhaps via their platform, so that in the future they’ll start aggregation services as well (the basics are already there through mini-feeds). MySpace, with the backing of News/ FIM will be heading in the same direction, both via in part supporting the standards set by Google, but holding back at the end so they can start cutting direct deals as well.

Conclusion

The opening scenario isn’t that far fetched and it’s definitely the direction we are heading in. The walled gardens of 1.0 are slowing coming down, with movements such as OpenID and DataPortability, and even Google’s Open Social establishing cross platform data compatibility. Ultimately the aggregation model presented today by FriendFeed will expand into ubiquitous two way communication across multiple platforms. Google became the starting point for search, who will become the starting point for social networking tomorrow??

Social Networking Cold War: FB To Open Source Platform

Duncan Riley — Tue, 27 May 2008 06:03:06 +0000

Too little, too late? TechCrunch reports that Facebook is about to open source its platform as developers flee the service for the open source Google led Open Social initiative.

Bebo already licenses access to the Facebook Platform so how it can be done is already visible. Under the new scheme ANY social network will be able to provide support for Facebook apps on their own site at no charge.

I opened the post with a question but I’m going to answer it by suggesting that while there is zero doubt that this move by Facebook is a direct response to Google (and reactionary moves are never brilliant) the depth of applications on the Facebook platform will likely see a slew of mid to low range social networks rolling out support for this.

The down side: we are now seeing a social networking cold war where various parties are lining up behind Google and Facebook, with some trying to remain neutral. Will the stand off benefit users? Unlikely, but the future of the biggest game in town is at stake, so expect both sides to further up the ante as the stand off continues.