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Surely you’ve noticed that Facebook has been tightening the screws on application developers, as the first mover in open social networking finds that the balance between it, its users, and all those third parties is becoming an increasingly narrow line to walk.

What we’ve witnessed is a push and pull relationship between those developers that would like to communicate with users on Facebook, and the regulation necessary for keeping that communication relevant. The entire space is watching this push-pull relationship because it has larger implications for integrated leveraging of user bases and integrated marketing, among other things, and everyone else gets to learn from the progress of Facebook.

Social.im, a Facebook instant messenger client that lets you chat with your Facebook friends on a desktop client, is making an interesting interception into the ongoing relationship between Facebook and application developers. Yan-David [Yanda] Erlich has told me, here at SXSW, that its latest product will let you receive your application updates through its IM client.

The updates will be non-intrusive, and will appear on the bottom corner of your computer. Similar to Facebook, Social.im will also have a feedback system by letting users click “yes” or “no” on these alerts. If you don’t click on it at all, then the alert will disappear, though it will still be archived for later availability. Unlike Facebook, application developers will be able to re-direct users to any link they’d like.

That removes some of the restrictions that Facebook has begun to place on the communication options between application developers and users, and also removes the surrounding feed information that shows on the actual Facebook feed. Does that make application alerts delivered through social.im more relevant towards users, and would it be able to remain so if those format for update delivery is expanded to other IM clients, browser plugins, and social media communications?

I imagine that brands would be interested in expanded distribution options for open social networking in this fashion, so I’ll be watching the space to see how this affects the existing relationship between Facebook and developers.

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