Friendster to follow Facebook and Launch Developer Platform

Forum Moderators: rogerd

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Friendster to follow Facebook and Launch Developer Platform

Openness is Winning

lorenzinho2

8:14 pm on Oct 25, 2007 (gmt 0)

Remember Friendster? The social networking site that predates Facebook and MySpace...and has 50 million users? Just like its wunderkind competitors, the site is launching its own developer platform. That's right -- yet another platform to keep track of. According to our tally sheet, social networking's granddaddy is joining the ranks of LinkedIn, Bebo, hi5, MySpace and Facebook with its platform aspirations.

[blog.wired.com...]

With the opening up of these big properties, acquiring users is no longer the only way to build a successful web company. You can now focus on building (viral) features.

rogerd

3:41 am on Oct 27, 2007 (gmt 0)

Extra stress for developers. Surely as these proliferate only a few will survive.

lorenzinho2

10:38 pm on Oct 27, 2007 (gmt 0)

Only a few developers? :) it is stressful with Facebook, because they are changing things a couple of times a week with their APIs. More often than not, these changes cause your apps to break. To the end user, your broken apps look like problems with YOUR service. When there are 3-5-7 major platforms to manage, this is going to be a real headache.

rogerd

2:10 am on Oct 29, 2007 (gmt 0)

You might be right about the developers, though I meant that only a few social-networks-as-development-platforms would end up attracting a lot of developer attention.

One way second-tier social networks could address this is by using standardized code so that little or no coding was needed to launch an app.