Over the past decade the explosion of Social Networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter has drastically changed the way how people interact socially.While these sites have built some of the best tools on the world wide web, the opening up of their product to developers via APIs in the past 3 years have spawned “developer ecosystems” that build applications over popular services like Twitter and Facebook that help a person do everything from network with travelers to play social online games. This article is a brief of 3 Social Networking Developer Ecosystems that would help you to better understand your options.

1. A Peek into Social Networking Developer Ecosystems
- Royston Olivera
Over the past decade the explosion of Social Networking sites like Facebook, MySpace
and Twitter has drastically changed the way how people interact socially. Social sites are
playing a key role in building social graphs, sharing information and fostering innovation.
The spectrum of its usability has grown widely since its inception, from users just
building profiles and making friends to businesses using it for branding & interacting
with their consumers, recruitment firms to find potential employees, science communities
for exchange of ideas, non-profits for spreading social good and by students & teachers
as a communication tool.This growth in its usability is due the hundreds of millions
of active users together spending billions of minutes everyday on these sites building
profiles, making status updates, uploading photos and building social graphs making them
information rich.
While these sites have built some of the best tools on the world wide web, the opening
up of their product to developers via APIs in the past 3 years has spawned "developer
ecosystems" that build applications over popular services like Twitter and Facebook that
help a person do everything from network with travelers to play social online games.
Given below is a brief of 3 Social Networking Developer Ecosystems that would help you
to better understand your options.
1. Facebook
Facebook launched the Facebook platform in May 2007 for application developers
that provides a framework to develop applications that would render within
facebook.com and interact with core Facebook features. Simultaineously a
markup language called the Facebook Markup Language(FBML) was also
introduced that is used to give applications the Facebook "look and feel" and hook
into several Facebook integration points, including the profile, profile actions,
Facebook canvas, News Feed and Mini-Feed. Since then, tens of thousands of
applications have been built on top of the Facebook platform. Later on, Facebook
Query Language (FQL) was introduced that allows you to use a SQL-style interface
to query Facebook social data without using the API. While most platforms
force developers to use iFrames if they want to embed javascript within the
application, Facebook answered this question with the introduction of FBJS that
allowed developers to manipulate markup on the fly, animation and AJAX making
applications more dynamic. Today, Facebook has over 350,000+ applications
that play a critical role in maximizing Facebook's active user base. Being the
most popular application on Facebook, "Farmville" currently has over 60 million
monthly active users.
In late 2008, Facebook announced Facebook Connect that allows developers to
let users login to their websites with their Facebook credentials. It even allows
other Facebook features, like your friend list and friend invite features to be
implemented on your website, which can in turn send data back to Facebook as
News Feeds. With over 15K websites already utilizing Facebook Connect, it has
now become a must have feature for every social website for 2 main reasons :
(1) Users do not have to go through the process of registering on your website
if they are a Facebook user, your website can directly pull info from the users
Facebook profile and (2) Your web site gets tons of exposure on Facebook as the
users actvities on your site get posted to his Facebook profile.
Facebook has even gone a step further in encouraging developers by introducing
the fbFund where developers can submit their applications to qualify for
investments to grow their venture.

2. 2. Twitter
Twitter is one of the best examples of an very Open API and has provided
developers a opportunity to build a full-fledged business by using it. Within a short
span of time this ecosystem has transformed into a mainstream phenomenon
with the development of Twitter apps that do everything from managing your
twitter profile to analyzing tweets for real world trends. The Twitter API is nothing
but a simple service that provides RESTfull access to the Twitter database and
activity streams. Twitter initially started of with the basic authentication by which
developers send the users credentials in the header of the HTTP request. But this
being insecure and difficult to track hence in early 2009 they integrated the OAuth
pattern of integration into the REST API permitting users a seamless experience
of login into a 3rd party website using their Twitter account.
Twitter lacks many features in its pursuit of for simplicity and this gives openings
to developers to fill the holes. Currently around 80% of Twitter's usage is via 3rd
party apps. and the Twitter API has 10x the traffic of its website. Twitter does
not have 300+ million active user but it has momentum, excitement and virility
which can cause your application to go from zero to a million users in a matter
of days or weeks. Twitter is fast growing and new features are getting added
regularly, requiring your application to adapt to it at the same time. A major
problem with the Twitter ecosystem is its stability, so you have to make sure that
your application doesn't break and throw heaps of code when the API is down.
3. MySpace
MySpace first got into the platform party by teaming with Google and a number
of other social networks against the Facebook platform and releasing OpenSocial
in November 2007, which were a set of API's that would make applications
interoperable with any social network system that supports it. The patnership
spearheaded an initiative to standardize and simplify the development of social
applications. Later on in early 2008 MySpace independently launched the
MySpace Developer Platform(MDP) that supports the OpenSocial model to
enhance the overall experience of users through the development of Social
Applications.
MySpace has undertaken a recent expansion of their platform through the
MySpaceID project. MySpaceID provides Developers the opportunity to access
user identities within the context of third-party environments. The main
components of the MySpace platform are pretty similar to that of Facebook, but
since MySpace supports the OpenSocial model the same application can be ported
to any other social network with just a few minor tweaks to the code. With just
around 15k apps in the MySpace apps Gallery and just a few websites integrating
with MySpaceID, the Facebook ecosytem emerges as the clear winner in this case.
No doubt that these 3 ecosystems are the best and most established but they aren't the
only ones. Networks like Bebo, Yahoo, Friendster and the recently launched Google
Wave have opened up their set of API's that would allow you to reach millions of users
through your applications. All these platforms are fast-growing and frequently-changing
for the good, so as a developer even though you have a lot of choice with the
ecosystems, it is suggested that you pick one ecosystem that you are a big fan of and
program for it as keeping pace with all the ecosystems would be a real challenging task.