Rick Williams

Shuzak’s presentation is very interesting.

One slide particularly got me thinking about some of Facebook’s recent moves. In the last couple of weeks Facebook has begun to put the kosh on invites in order to create more thoughful and considered applications and drive the spammers away.

I thought OpenSocial’s achilles heel was this lack of ‘virality’. It’s possible to create generic applications, but OpenSocial cannot take advantage of Facebook’s social graph. It is however scalable. And that’s the irony, because if you build something on Facebook that works through the social graph, it will be impossible (at the moment) to get it working across OpenSocial – All those viral invitations useless…

By pushing back so heavily on the invites, Facebook is helping developers not to think about how to game viral goodness out of the platform, but instead how to build really engaging applications. It also let’s any particularly successful applications that work on OpenSocial to benefit from additional engagement with the social graph rather than being spammed with it.

Despite Facebook’s very clean and well documented platform, the numbers still matter, and although the experience and audience will be more engaging and valuable on Facebook, it’s dwarfed by the 250+ million accessible users available on OpenSocial. I’d hate to be an OpenSocial developer right now though…it looks painful!

Undoubtedly there’ll be experiences created for both platforms, but I doubt very much whether there’ll be one killer branded application that’ll work just as well on either…unless it’s a mobile one…who could forget Tetris