Facebook, MySpace and Google Open Up

I read with great interest on Friday that Facebook is soon going to let websites like BigOven.com and ClearStay.com -- two sites I'm involved with -- access user profiles.   That is huge news.  You can read about it on the facebook developers blog.

MySpace (the first large site to this "data portability" party) and Google (rumored to be announcing Monday) are also opening up.  Yahoo! is getting into the act with "Yahoo! Open", and "Search Monkey", which allow developers to tap into the social profiles as well as the search results.

Let's say you're a Facebook user.  This seems to mean:

• With your permission, BigOven.com could access your profile information, a list of your friends, for instance to let you know what recipes on the site your Facebook friends liked, or to open up a private channel for you to suggest recipes for each other.
• Now, the above scenario is possible today with Facebook's API, but only if you built a mini-application inside of Facebook.  With Facebook connect, it appears BigOven.om will be able to fetch and display useful information about the user, and populate user profiles, access friends lists, and more.  Very interesting.

Facebook now has an astonishingly high 70 million members at this writing.  (BigOven.com has a little over 100,000.)  So we've got a pretty good incentive to get cracking on this.

At the simplest level, this will appear to the user in the form of only having to enter social profile information once.  If you've told Facebook that you and Jim are friends, and that you're a female from Orlando, you shouldn't have to re-tell that to BigOven.com.  So at a very minimum, this reduction in friction should be a terrific boon to vertically-focused social networks like BigOven.com.    We've got a "friends" concept at BigOven.com, but it's seen fairly little use so far.  This should help tremendously.

Further reading:  Facebook Connect -- Another Step to Open Social Networks, Charlene Li, Forrester

It remains to be seen just how open social networks will be with their data, but I love this race toward openness -- it gives rapid-development sites a leg-up in establishing critical mass.