Marc Cantor is ecstatic to hear that Facebook is opening up it’s walled garden by providing developers with a public API (Application Programming Interface). This makes retrieving information from Facebook and displaying the results in any application a snap.
Marc says:
A full 6-12 months ahead of schedule Facebook has – in a single blow – broken open this whole game. Now the race begins to build out services and applications (even content) around these APIs. Anyone wish to guess on how long it’ll take MySpace and Bebo to respond?
This is exactly what I’ve been talking about for the dating industry! I just found out that Yahoo Personals has had an invite-only partner API since January, which I will talk about soon.
Dating sites will open up their walled gardens when they figure out how to make money doing so. Problem is, most of the sites that have approached them haven’t had the vision to create a truly useful service or the technical chops to make it work.
Hopefully the Facebook deal will quicken the pace for well-funded, strategically savvy companies to come knocking on the dating industry’s door and offer up the kinds of value-added services that the major dating sites couldn’t dream of.
SJ Mercury News has a good article about how MySpace drives a growing ecosystem, where several websites have launched complimentary services and gone on to great heights (YouTube and Photobucked.)
GigaOm says that XuQa is letting people import their MySpace profiles wholesale. As an aside, Browser (PC only, boo!) cleans up ugly Myspace pages into a readable format.
Silicon Beat on the MySpace ecosystem.
The only thing a start-up needs is to have MySpace users rave about its features, and its growth will skyrocket.
MySpace is clearly having difficulty figuring out its policy — it is on the fence about how much to encourage other companies serving the ecoystem, or to discourage it.
Absolutely. There are a lot of companies doing much better than expected due to high adoptation rates on MySpace. It’s an incredibly effective way to test new services.
This WSJ article, Moguls of New Media, talks about how Christine Dolce, whose MySpace page boasts nearly one million friends, has leveraged her looks and connections into a start-up clothing company, fame and growing fortune.
There are a lot of young people taking advantage of the viral nature of social networking to launch promising careers built on countless late night webcam sessions in surburban housing tracts across America.
I need to work on my new version of Lazy Sunday. I’m sure it’s going to make me a star.
Technorati Tags: open+profiles, viral+video
