The race for Social Network integration
There has been some interesting news coming from social networks over the last couple of days. Yesterday MySpace announced a Silverlight API for developing applications on the MySpace Open Platform. As well they announced that MySpace will be available on Windows Mobile. The move will put MySpace on most mobile platforms, which include IPhone, Blackberry, and Android. Fast forward to today and Adobe has announced the official ActionScript 3.0 Client Library for Facebook Platform API, fully supported by Facebook and Adobe. Are these announcements purely coincidental? Maybe. And I don’t want to really get into Flash vs. Silverlight debate at any level. The most interesting thing to me is that Microsoft has made a investment in Facebook, to the tune of $240 million dollars. The investment is based around their Ad Platform and search, but you think that it would put Facebook as their number 1 social network to integrate with. Instead they partner with MySpace, where a $900 million dollar search deal with Google is set to expire in the second quarter of 2010. Is this deal just the beginning of a new and long partnership? Only time will tell. The great news as developers is we are getting API’s and Frameworks that are officially supported by both parties, technology creators and social networks, which provides us with a streamlined process to deploy applications. This couldn’t come at a better time for us as we have 4 really big Facebook applications in the works. And if you want to be a part of the team to work on those we are looking for some talented people. April Fuel’s Day
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