Facebook Joins Myspace on Google's Friend List

Facebook appears to have decided not to fight Google's plans to bring social networking sites together.

Jim Breyer, an investor and board member at Facebook, reportedly says the company would be willing to join Google's OpenSocial platform. That's a scheme by which programmers can more easily create applications that run on many different social networking sites. For example, a user could make a single blog post that is instantly viewable by their friends on both MySpace and Bebo.

One of the main reasons for Facebook's success to date is that users can create their own applications such as quizzes or games which they can play against their friends. The viral nature of the site means that a successful application can soon have millions of users. But applications for Facebook have to be written in a special language named FBML which does not work on other social networking sites.

Because of the perception that Facebook was trying to keep its application system exclusive, some commentators had dubbed the OpenSocial scheme 'the Facebook killer'. It was thought that if the new scheme covered more users than Facebook, developers would be more likely to create applications for OpenSocial. (Source: Betanews.com)

This theory gained a lot of ground when MySpace joined the OpenSocial scheme last Thursday night. Chris Wolfe, MySpace CEO said, "This is about helping the start-up spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network." (Source: Arstechnica.com)

However, according to writer Peter Kakfa, Facebook has no objection in principle to the OpenSocial scheme. He reports Jim Breyer as saying Facebook's business model does not rely on keeping its applications exclusive, and that users may be able to exchange information with other social networks within a year. Breyer also claims the company does not need any additional funding at the moment, and has no plans to go public till at least 2009. (Source: Alleyinsider.com)