Bebo Making Major Platform Announcement on Tuesday - SendMeRSS
Posted by elveston priory at 11:08 am
Facebook’s Platform and Google’s OpenSocial may be stealing all the headlines, but next week Bebo will finally make a platform move of its own. We’re free to tell you this, of course, because Bebo already did in its last press release:
In addition to supporting OpenSocial, Bebo announced its plans to launch a Developers Platform that will make it easy for Facebook developers to port their applications to the Bebo platform.
Bebo’s adoption of OpenSocial is the first in a series of major announcements planned by Bebo before the end of 2007. Bebo is scheduled to make a further platform announcement on November 13, 2007.
Bebo, LinkedIn, MySpace and others were all developing their own proprietary APIs when Google stepped up with their OpenSocial offering. In fact, we covered Bebo founder Michael Birch’s plan for a Bebo Platform back in July, meaning that a full launch has been a long time coming. In terms of openness, all we’ve seen so far is Bebo Widgets, an opportunity for big players like RockYou and Slide to get their widgets on Bebo profiles.
Just a plain old platform launch would look boring and proprietary coming after the radical strategic shift proposed by OpenSocial. Bebo may therefore offer a consolation prize: the “porting” tool that its reps have been hinting at, which allows developers to easily port their existing Facebook apps to Bebo. Or, if they’ve managed to get their act together, we may see the actual debut of OpenSocial on Bebo.
Getting into Bebo early would be a smart move for developers. Not only is it massive, but it’s massively underrated: US developers fail to recognize the influence of the site in the UK and Ireland.
I have a few more tidbits on this, but we were asked not to disclose those. Journos will find out more in the next day or two thanks to the inevitable embargoed press release.
User comment: By: Link to Your WorldThe comment in your article where you state "Bebo may therefore offer a consolation prize: the "porting" tool that its reps have been hinting at, which allows developers to easily port their existing Facebook apps to Bebo. Or, if they've managed to get their act together, we may see the actual debut of OpenSocial on Bebo." says it all. Google should have created a "porting tool" for developers when you decided to release OpenSocial but it appears as though they were in a rush to "one up" the Microsoft announcement. No doubt we will see more creative strategic moves by other players in the space as everyone everywhere strives for position. The winner will be.......those whom have the greatest creative strategic advantage, see www.relationship-economy.com for definition of creative strategic advantage. What say you?
Visit here to subscribe to these comments[...] Original post by Pete Cashmore [...]