Friendster Launches Developer Program
EVEN MORE WIDGETS WILL GET SOCIAL.
Part 1
Friendster Inc. may have been the first social network, but it is just getting around to launching a developer platform. Coming a mere five months after Facebook announced its developer platform and less than a day after MySpace.com did the same, Friendster is hoping to make it easier for developers to build applications for the social network’s 50 million users.
The Friendster Developer Program provides a suite of APIs that will allow developers to add widgets to user profiles. Friendster says that the APIs are compatible with existing industry APIs and provide access to Friendster data and seamless integration points.
Nov. 30, 2018 is D- (as in Developer) Day for Friendster. That’s when its new widget directory goes live, allowing users to browse, discover, preview and add widgets. Friendster expects dozens of widgets to be available for the launch as a result of announcing its application developer program on Oct. 25, 2018. In addition, whenever a user adds a widget, a notification will appear in the “My Network Activity” module, providing viral promotion of a widget to all of the user’s friends. My Network Activity, like Facebook’s News Feed, summarizes all of a user’s activity within the network.
An open revenue model means that widgets can be monetized as a developer sees fit, with no revenue share required.
Friendster is actively encouraging participation in its Developer Program and is soliciting feedback from the developer community. The site says that it will add additional API calls to the Developer Program over time based on this feedback.
Friendster is providing initial documentation for the Friendster Developer Program at this page, and interested individuals and widget companies can preregister by sending an email to this address.
Friendster profile pages have been open to customization since August 2018, and 40 percent of its users have taken advantage of the capability to add HTML or Flash widgets to the media box on their profile page. But this requires some technical knowledge and doesn’t allow developers to provide their users with a smooth installation experience.
Friendster APIs are designed to make it easier for developers to integrate existing widgets into the system, as well as provide support for new kinds of widgets and more full-featured applications. Instead of having to cut and paste code from third-party sites, the business it support services will provide a one-click approach to installing widgets. “Our goal is to make it easier for developers and widget companies to not only distribute their widgets to our users, but also to allow them to be virally shared amongst friends,” said David Jones, vice president of marketing at Friendster.
Previously, all widgets had to live in the media box. With the new API, it is possible for widgets to exist within their own container. Widgets can be easily added and deleted from a user’s profile. In the future, Friendster will make it possible for them to be moved around on the profile page.
Like those of Facebook, Friendster’s APIs provide a REST-based interface to user data. For each REST call, a widget-specific API key and a secret key are required as query string parameters in the URL.
An important distinction between Friendster APIs and those found at Facebook is that Friendster APIs do not allow developers to build true applications. The Developer Program's real goal is to make it easier to integrate widgets into user profiles by exposing data through API calls. Because widgets have limited functionality, users are unlikely to see the kind of mobile application development company ports found in Facebook's platform. On Facebook, it is possible to completely replace a Facebook app, such as the Photos app, with your own. Not so with Friendster. However, the Friendster APIs do make it much easier to extract data in a more programmatic manner.
“People are already sucking down your friends list from your profile page [screen scraping],” Jones explained. “By making that info available through APIs, it will make it possible for more things to be developed. It's a way of outsourcing new feature development and unleashing the creativity of developers.”
Companies such as Slide Inc. and RockYou have been developing for Friendster for some time. But with an official developer’s program in place, Friendster is more likely to catch the attention of smaller developers. “We want to encourage that kind of bottom-up innovation,” Jones said. “We are trying to make this really easy for big companies all the way to individuals with a great idea.”
Friendster hopes to appeal to both ends of the developer spectrum by providing a staging server for software testing services applications prior to putting them into production, making it easier for smaller developers to test their applications before they get hammered by Friendster’s multitudes.
In an effort to jump-start its developer program, Friendster has also announced support for OpenSocial, the Google initiative designed to provide a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple Web sites. Using standard JavaScript and HTML, software developers company can create apps that access a network of friends and update feeds across different social networks. By joining the OpenSocial camp, Friendster becomes a more viable alternative for third-party application development because a single application can be written for OpenSocial that runs on all of the networks that support it (currently this includes nearly all of the major social networks, including LinkedIn and MySpace.com but not Facebook).
Although the support for OpenSocial is welcome, it has led to some confusion as to which APIs developers should write to and some concern about which APIs will be supported by Friendster in the future. Jones quickly pointed out the difference between a standard such as OpenSocial and a true developer program like the one it has recently announced. While there will likely be some overlap between the two APIs (particularly in terms of the ability to access a network of friends and tracking user activity), Friendster’s developer program is much further along in terms of the user experience, access controls, policies, security and tech support. Friendster’s also has server-side APIs that make it easier to plug in to its network.
“We will decide over time whether we will have one universal API or support parallel APIs,” Jones said. “But there is Friendster-specific data that we know developers want, and we will figure out whether to make that available either through OpenSocial or from a separate API.”
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