Networking and News Sites scramble to keep up with Facebook.

So in this blog and elsewhere there's been a lot of hullabaloo about Facebook lately. If you weren't sure that this was a herald of a real change in how people expect to use the web, take a look at these four announcements from other major web players. 1) Google: Back last month, TechCrunch reported that google was getting ready for an announcement about an open developer's API that would compete with the attention that the Facebook Platform is getting from developers. The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time. 2)LinkedIn, the professional networking site that often seems like little more than a sharable rolodex, has an announcement of its own. BITS reported on October 12th that LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye is "rushing to copy the electronic underpinnings of Facebook’s elegant application programming interface, or A.P.I., that allows outside developers to weave their own programs into its site." But to preserve the all-business-all-the-time feeling of the popular site (current growth is at 1 million new accounts every 25 days) Nye has vowed: “We have no interest in doing it like Facebook with an open A.P.I. letting people do whatever they want,” Mr. Nye said. “We’re not going to have people sending electronic hamburgers to each other.” 3) MSNBC meanwhile ran a report that it had purchased social news site Newsvine. Newsvine is not as well none as social news innovator Digg, where users rank stories and push them to the "front page". But as MSNBC reported, the site has generated significant buzz since its launch in March 2006 because of its inventive merger of mainstream reporting from The Associated Press and ESPN; the contributions of individual users, who are paid for their writing; and the social media model of user-driven ranking of the news. 4) MySpace, Facebooks's most direct competitor, has decided that it too needs to be more like it's college-educated sibling. They've recently announced a Myspace platform, with structures and capabilities strikingly like those of it's rival. The new developer platform... will essentially be a set of APIs and a new markup language that will allow third party developers to create applications that run within MySpace. Developers will be able to include Flash applets, iFrame elements and Javascript snippets in their applications, and access most of the core MySpace resources (profile information, friend list, activity history, etc.). Applications will need to be hosted on MySpace servers.