Gawker: valleywag, developer relations

OpenSocial is real, swears Googler in charge

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:22:49 EST

OpenSocial, which we've always maintained is a surprisingly elegant PR scam, isn't due out until next year. Facebook continues to add 100 (still entirely useless) apps a day to its now purportedly open platform. So is there any point to Google's OpenSocial anymore? Sure there is. Just ask the guy whose career at Google depends on it.

Google's Joe Kraus told The Social, "We've made a lot of progress." You people on the outside just can't see it yet, he said.

"In the classic kind of platform world, what typically happens is there's a lot of work that goes on that isn't consumer-visible," Kraus said. Which of course means, Trust us. We're Google.

Facebook throws platform at rivals, pokes Google

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:51:34 EST

Facebook wasn't invited to the OpenSocial party. Now it's throwing its own. Facebook says it will allow other social networks to use the software behind its third-party developer platform as a model. "In fact, we'll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms," Ami Vora writes on its Facebook Developers blog. The big loser? Well, anyone who writes apps for social networks, pretty much by definition. But also, Google.

At least one OpenSocial launch partner, Bebo, has already decided to go with the Facebook Platform. Expect more to follow. Google has yet to match the hype surrounding its OpenSocial announcement, admitting earlier this week its platform won't be ready until next year. "Open" is just another word for nothing left to lose.

Facebook's viral marketing catches a bug

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 13:49:37 EST

Developers write apps for Facebook not because it's a wonder of modern software, but because it lets them tap into Facebook's 60 million users. The result: a surfeit of zombie bites and Scrabble challenges, spread, in Valley parlance, "virally" from friend to friend on the social network. Last night, Facebook proved antiviral. A bug deleted all pending requests from friends to add an application. "Anyone else seeing that invitation acceptance numbers are down significantly over the past 7-8 hours?" one developer wrote in a Facebook forum. "Since about midnight PT, our signup numbers through requests/invites are about 40% lower than we'd normally expect." Facebook's response? An emoticon!

Hey, there appears to have been some data loss last night. It seems (ironically) that a script that was supposed to be backing things up and cleaning out old platform requests that were already acted on actually went haywire and instead deleted new requests that were not supposed to have been deleted. :(

Somehow, the all-powerful colon plus closed parenthesis managed to placate developers. Next up: Community relations via lolcats.