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Here’s an interesting piece from Michael Arrington at Techcrunch about how Google is lining up to tackel the “Facebook problem”…

Google To “Out Open” Facebook On November 5
Michael Arrington

Yesterday [DI> Sept 20th] a select group of fifteen or so industry luminaries attended a highly confidential meeting at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to discuss the company’s upcoming plans to address the “Facebook issue.”

The meeting was so secret that all attendees had to sign confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements strictly forbidding them from discussing what was shown to them at the meeting. Notwithstanding that NDA, I’ve now spoken with three of the attendees off record to get an understanding of what Google is planning. Google’s goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be 100%.

more here on Techcrunch…

Appfuel’s Dynamic Facebook Ads Network
from Mashable! by Kristen Nicole

Appfuel is the latest to launch an ad network for Facebook apps. This one looks to be the system that most resembles your typical ad network for a website, and looks to provide more targeted ads. And fast. The goal is to offer relevant ads in less than a half second, creating highly targeted ads depending on the keywords.

On top of its marketplace for advertisers and web publishers, Appfuel also has a new self-serve campaign dashboard where anyone can advertise via Facebook apps for targeting their desired demographic. The company has also hinted that the ability to serve their own dynamic ads through the appfuel network is on its way. For publishers, it appealing to every level of their existence with the ability to promote applications through its appXchange and as an advertiser on its own network.

Kewego, besides having traditional video sharing sites in 10 European countries, also provides white-label sites to companies such as Orange, Lycos, T-Online, and French Broadcaster, M6.

The video sharing site Kewego.com, has raised $6.9 million US in a second-round of funding.

Kewego is the joint venture that formed out of two French sites merging their services. The offspring raised $6.3 million in the first round of funding from Banxei Venture Partners, who also returned for the second round. Also joining in this time is CDC Enterprises.
via Mashable! by Sean P. Aune

White label video site provider vSocial has announced a second round of funding from Biltmore Ventures and Consor Capital. The company also announced that Howard Lindzon, the creator of Wallstrip, will be joining the company’s board of directors.

Unlike video destination sites like YouTube and Veoh, vSocial provides a platform that lets other companies launch their own video sites with their own branding. For example, Volleyball.com, a volleyball news and e-commerce site, has launched a vSocial powered community that includes both video and social networking features.

vSocial currently serves 1.5 million visitors per day to about 200,000 unique visitors, according to the company’s press release.

Via Mashable! by Adam Ostrow

Over the last year or so I have grown very fond of the strategy of opening up and API to your social media applications. There are three reasons for doing this:
- quickly generate new features that utilize your core functionality
- generate new users which you can subsequently monetize
- quickly scale your application and platform

The fact is, no matter how big your dev team is, there is more resource and creativity outside of your organization than there is within it.

There is a great article here about box.net and its API…

Box.Net provides a very open API for developers. You can access file sharing and Box’s services directly from SOAP, XML POST, or REST API’s. That means we can use them right from Expression Blend’s XML data source giving Blend WPF and Silverlight instant access to online files and sharing. This opens up a whole new realm of functionality to Blend RIA developers..
Box.net is (rightly) getting a lot of acclaim for makin an API vaialable to developers.

Bebo is partnering with Microsoft in order to use its Windows Live instant messaging service throughout the Bebo network. This marks the first time Microsoft has partnered with a social network to provide IM tools.

Full article on Mashable here.

What’s interesting is that Bebo, with all its developer might is choosing to outsource this technology. I think its smart and its a strategy I’ve been talking about for a long while: why re-invent the wheel? If you can deploy quicker and better with a partner product, especially if it already has mass user adoption, it adds value to your core. It makes perfect sense.

Old-school software developers are turning in their graves at the thought of opening up APIs into their code so that others can write new apps that use their data and processes. Its a scary notion, but it makes perfect sense for consumer web apps in the web 2.0 world.

Consider this, if you are developing and running an enterprise app, something that runs your business, something that your staff use in their daily processes to conduct your business, the story is very different. Often your data is considered a component of your competitive advantage so why would you want to open that up to possible competitors? You probably wouldn’t, and that’s how many MIS managers minds are still thinking.

But, in the world of the read/write web, where apps are written for consumers to use, and given to them for free its a different story. We monetize our businesses based on large numbers of user using our services over our competitors, and that is achieved by being competitive and being well known - opening up an API is a neat way to do this. Why? It’s well explained here (except from Wikinomics by Don Tapscott) with the aid of an example, Technorati:

“Perhaps the most powerful characteristic of the programmable web is that it invites collaboration by design with open standards and open application programming interfaces (API) that allow separate websites to intermingle. Startups like Flickr, 43 Things, del.icio.us, Technorati [DI> and Facebook, Yelp, Google Maps, Microsoft Maps, etc, etc] for example opened up their APIs as a way to crank out new features, attract users, and scale up their businesses quickly.

Lets just reinforce that point can we, this is a strategy to:
• crank out new features
• attract users
• scale up your businesses quickly.

If you are operating in today’s web space aren’t these the things you are trying to achieve?

“It comes down to a question of limited time and, frankly, limited creativity” says Tantek Celik, Chief Technologist at Technorati. “No matter how smart you are, and no matter how hard you work, three or four people in a start-up – or even small companies with thirty people – can only come up with so many great ideas.”

Its all based on a principle the new generation of Web start-ups learned from the open-source software community: There are always more smart people outside your enterprise boundaries than there are inside. By opening up their APIs companies create an environment for low-risk experimentation where anybody who wants to develop on top of their platforms can do so. Celik says there are potentially millions of developers who might just have the right combination of skills and insight to create something really valuable. “No need to send you a formal request,” says Celik. “They can just take those APIs and innovate. Then, if someone builds a great new service or capability, we’ll work out a commercial licensing agreement so that everybody makes money.”

Other posts from me about API and Mashups

The push towards openness continues. Local reviews site Yelp rolled out an API at the start of August, allowing other developers to build apps upon and mashup Yelp local search data.

Functions include the ability to retrieve reviews and ratings, display review info, track reviews for a certain business, display images of high-rated local businesses and look up business ratings using the business’ phone number, among other things. Examples include a map-based search for sushi restaurant reviews embedded on your site.

One of the first to mke use of this is a new app for the iPhone called iPhocal it uses the Yelp API to offer you local search on your iPhone.

The search tool works as you would expect. Type in a search term and enter a city, and you’ll receive a list of search results. Choosing one of these results will lead you to a detail page that shows the pertinent information, like address and phone number. You’ll also be able to read the comments of Yelp users that have reviewed the particular venue or location you’re looking up.

Original article at Mashable

Facebook confirmed yesterday that it has killed off its Courses feature. This was a way to enter your college classes and display your courses on your profile, created prior to the Facebook Platform. In contrast to the usual scheme of things, however, Facebook is retiring Courses in favor of better services created by 3rd party developers on the Facebook Platform:

As of today, we’re turning off our version of Courses and have decided to turn this over to the developer community and let you – our users – decide which Courses application works best for you…In many ways, our developer community is the best suited to create the applications that help people connect, track, and collaborate.

Although most developers assume the worst about APIs - that they’re simply a way to outsource research and development so the host can steal all the good ideas - this move contradicts that assumption. Instead of trying to clone the best apps in-house, Facebook is referring users to 3rd party applications like Course List and Courses ++.

Mashable

Edgeio, the aggregated classifieds website, has created a widget that lets you distribute content and enables you to sell content directly through the widget as well.

This makes it easier to distribute content because it allows customers to purchase the content via the widget, and view it immediately through the widget as well. It removes steps for paid content, and allows publishers to expand on the places their content can be seen. What’s more, is as a widget distributor, you can take a cut of the sales made. This is like earning ad revenue, but for direct sales of content, instead.

The widget can be used by any publisher, from a newspaper to an e-zine or a blog. Pick and choose which content will be sold through the widget (podcasts, text, images, etc.) and place it on your site or encourage others to place it on their site as well. It’s a good way for publishers to retain their branding while spreading full access to their content. I consider this a good way of taking what Scribd has made popular and applying it to branded, paid content distribution.

Mashable