New API allows developers to use YouTube content in their online or offline applications more extensivelly. Here are some key features:

• Create a web front end to let people view videos about specific topics.
• Create a desktop application or plugin that plays videos in a customized environment.
• Add related, dynamic video content to your website or application.
• Customise the Flash player to fit the look and feel of your site, device or application
• Add feeds of videos from each of YouTube’s 18 international domains

More technical details in Google code website.

As opposed to Facebook, MySpace are going to have two or so month lead in period, so to allow fair play for all developers. Until that moment has passed no application is allowed to have more than ten or so installs.

A little bit worrying comment is this:

As for OpenSocial compatibility, company representatives say that 90% of MySpace’s platform aligns with the OpenSocial specification, meaning that OpenSocial developers will have to do a little bit of reengineering to get their applications to work.

What are the 10% delta we’ll soon to find out. I have to admit that I don’t yet have MySpace account, which is a shame. So first thing on today’s agenda is get myself an account and start playing with the platform.

Facebook has introduced it’s open platfrom about 6 months ago. Since than more that 70,000 developers lined up under its flags. About a month ago Google introduced its OpenSocial that is a direct competitor with Facebook’s platfrom. Small company with a lot of users an developers against a big company with not so many users and no developers. The stage is set.

The biggest threat to Facebook application platfrom and applications running on it is the Facebook itself. Or is it a benefit? Anyway, Facebook is a Microsoft of social networks. As long as people are on Facebook (willing to use Windows), applications are fine (application.exe are fine).
Google OpenSocial is a … no, it is not a Mac. It’s Linux. Open ( it’s even called open! ), container independent, not-so-evil as proprietary competitors. A lot of hype around it, a lot of flag waving and so on. But not so many real users and certainly not so many developers. But a lot of quality PR.

Classical example. Everyone will get a market share and probably Google will eventually get it all as Google usually do. But today Facebook and Bebo broke the rules of the game. Facebook licensed its platform to be used on other social network sites.

Maybe Facebook is not like Microsoft after all?

1) 1990 - Archie . Created by a few students at McGuill University in Montreal and designed to search for scientific documents. Archie was originally a local tool that grew to become network services based on FTP protocol. It has a trawler, index database and a search interface. Important limitation - it could only search for document titles.
Actually, you can still check it out. There is one that takes your search query and returns the list of results via e-mail. Neat!

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This is of course is pure announcement hype since non of OpenSocial partners has managed to produce any significant value to their users.Not yet that is.

Take Facebook – Adonomics evaluation renders an active user value at $270. This is how much value user brings to Facebook itself.

It is a bit more difficult with third-party applications running on social network platform. I have seen different views generally ranging from $0.30 to $1.

What do you think?

• Like it?
• Don’t like it?
• Know of a better webpage?

It’s all experimental and in testing phase.

Emphasis is on the social note. However to work properly I believe it has to be tightly integrated into existing social networks. Ideally, search results should not be influenced by the whole internet community, but only by the preferences of the close friends group.

Company that I’ll take as example is Box.net. Company was founded in 2005, they are specialising in online storage solutions and they were the first company to provide this service. For those who don’t know, online storage means that you can store, retrieve and share you files on the web and access them from anywhere. All you need is a web browser. Box.net also provides an open API for accessing the data. Company has 1.2 million users with over a million files served each day.

To expand and get more users Box.net wrote an application for Facebook, which allows accessing and using Box.net services directly from your Facebook account.

All you have to do is to add their application (if you don’t have an account with Box.net, they allow you to create one immediately, registration process is very simple an literally takes 10 seconds).

There’s very subtle, but yet effective viral marketing item. If you invite your friend to Box.net application, you’ll get extra 20MB of storage for each friend you invite.

Using the service is pretty straightforward:

• Add (remove) folders
• Upload files
• Share folders/files
• View (access) you friend’s files

User interface is minimalistic and very intuitive:

Overall impression is very good, and the service is quite useful. If you want to share something between your friends this application is a must have. I may try to be picky here and note that 20MB for free these days isn’t the greatest deal, but the ease of use and convenience might overweight the limitation. If you need more storage, pricing is very attractive and is only 2$/month for extra 2GB.

It also serves as a good example on how easy is to expand your business into Facebook arena and start enjoying the growing user base. Box.net already attracted over 71,000 users with over 1,400 active daily users. Box.net themselves recognise the importance of this move and I’m happy that Facebook application pool has really useful applications, besides all the fun stuff.