According to TechCrunch MySpace will launch MySpace Platform next week. The release of the Facebook Platform in may this year is probably one of the reason for the extreme success Facebook is enjoying right now. As TechCrunch points out, there will be even more competition in this area in the coming future:
Suddenly Facebook, with nearly 5,500 third party applications, has significant competition around their platform – Within a month both MySpace and Google (see our post here) will probably have launched their own services. Platform competition is great for developers, but it also means they need to create and maintain separate code for each platform they choose to play on. Someone is hopefully working on a startup that will streamline that process for people. Whoever does it first, and best, can have a winner on their hands.
Ad Yahoo! to this and 2-10 today known and not known social networks with open API:s for social applications. Developers do not want to create x number of variations of their application. As I see it there are three possible ways this will evolve:
- All the big ones will sit down and decide on a standard API in order to not miss any good application within their Platform.
- An external player will create and manage a standardized API that will offer cross-platform-support
- Different platforms will expose different API:s and see this as a “feature” and “offer” to the application developers.
The first point is the W3C-way, really slow, difficult to achieve and probably totally useless and will slow down the fast growing social application development taking place right now. The second solution is a dreamy black-box-solution that will make programmers and architects wet their pants when they think they have solved the problem. The problem is that the problem is too big to solve and the black-box will be a big huge code-bucket of spaghetti. The third way is the natural way, we have seen the browser wars go there, and all poker- and casino-networks today work like this, making it hard to create platform-independent software.
So the analysis is that Social Networking and Open API:s will make development of web-based applications even more complex and harder to maintain. Thats the sad truth but we will probably see a lot of cool and interesting applications.
But, if someone creates this magic black box solution to this, they will be one step closer to the secrets of alchemy.
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