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.

Facebook Developers Garage

Last week I attended the Facebook Developers Garage in DC. I'd pictured it as a room with a bunch of developers at tables, laptops open, showing off the ways they'd managed to build useful tools using the Facebook Platform or API. Instead, it was largely a presentation by folks from the Facebook Platform team - Ami Vora and Ezra Callahan. The evening made clear the excitement, both inside and outside Facebook, that the open platform is generating, as well as the general confusion about what would constitute a truly useful Facebook app and how a developer would monetize it. Facebook's rate of growth alone make developers want to be associated with it. Currently at about 45 million users, the service is adding about 250,000 users each day. Half of all Facebook users visit the site every day. And despite Facebook's origins as a university-based site, these new users are predominantly older. To attract the developer community, the vc's associated with Facebook have created fbFund, which makes small seed grants ($25K-$250K) to help development groups get a project launched. Success with the Facebook framework brings its own challenges. TJ Murphy of Freewebs spoke about the experience he had with the Warbook game he wrote. It rapidly picked up 87,000 users, half of whom played ever day. Third party developers are required to host their own apps. So TJ found himself scrambling to scale up: currently the game is hosted at Amazon. It's the chance of getting in front of audiences this size that is attractive to organizations trying to build their brand. How to do it is the open question. Most third party apps to date have been social entertainments: tools to share music, or book reviews, for example, or utilities to enhance the poking and posting functions of the site. Some of these are quite nice: I really enjoy Christain Montoya's Social Tags application. But when a member of the audience took the mike to ask how many of the developers in the room were thinking of using the platform to develop a customized presence for individual client organizations who wanted to leverage the popularity and stickiness of the site, I saw no hands but mine. And the people I chatted with at the event seemed to be primarily developers... I met only one representative of a non-profit who was there to explore the possibility of extending the presence of his org via Facebook. Despite the confusion at this early point, I think it is clear that social networking is going to play an increasing role in non-profit strategies in the near future - and that Facebook, with its developers platform and huge user base, will be a focus of this networking.

Over my morning coffee

Five Things, redux I felt vaguely weird responding to the five-things game yesterday... so I was pleased to see that Jeff Atwood, author of the Coding Horror blog, also had complex feelings about responding. Which he did in a novel way. Look at that office: I guess he isn't working primarily for non-profits! He writes a great blog on software engineering and design though. He has a tendency to stop and ponder issues that are easy to pass right over, like last week's thoughtful post on the selection of default values in software applications. It really makes sense. When we add new features, we usually set them off by default. But if a particular setting is one you think best for most of your users, shouldn't that be the default configuration? The digital life Kilkat at Geeks are Sexy points readers to an article in Information Week that documents of the use of cell phones and pcs by toddlers as young as two. According to this piece, 15% of children age 2-5 in the United States use cell phones. A Washington Post story, just a day earlier, focuses on the surrender of privacy that is implied in many of the high-tech conveniences that have become commonplace over the last few years - from EZPass to GPS to online shopping. Security vs Panache? The non-profits we work with are always trying to pack more punch into their communications with supporters. We've seen more and more of them adopt graphics-rich HTML mailings newsletters to help them get their message across. Which is why I felt that Brian Krebs' position in this Washington Post blog just wasn't going to sway a lot of readers. It's true that active emails can try to sneak around security measures - but I don't think users are going to go back to the plain-text for their critical constituent communications. It's Windows fault if just reading an email can trash my pc, and Microsoft needs to fix it - that's what I bet most users will say. What do you think?