A Major Difference Between Bebo and OpenSocial

Yesterday afternoon I had the opportunity to speak with Jessica Alter of Bebo.com. She gave me some much needed updates in regards to yesterday morning’s post about SNAPI defeating OpenSocial. She informed me about a number of things that helped shed some light on the status of OpenSocial and how Bebo launched their platform. One of the primary things that we discussed was the difference between OpenSocial and what I coined “SNAPI” (the Social Network API).

The first thing of importance is that while Bebo partnered with Facebook, it was not in developing the platform.  Instead they worked together to ensure compatibility between the two platforms.  Bebo did all of the development in house but used Facebook as a model for developing their platform since it was well designed. Also according to Jessica, Bebo used the prefix SN “in order to help standardize platforms across intensely social sites.” 

Additionally, during our conversation I started to realize that while OpenSocial aims to eventually be a competitor to the Facebook platform (and newly released platforms), it is currently not a competitor and won’t be one for sometime. Google is attempting to tackle a broader problem while Facebook (and other social platforms) is focused on a much more specific aspect of social web development.

The end result is that Google is a much better solution for distributing widgets on the web while SNAPI is more effective for quickly launching robust social applications across multiple platforms. Perhaps OpenSocial will exist strictly as a tool for distributing widgets. By the time they have launched more detailed features it could very well be too late.