Slashdot | Social Networking Sites Opening Their APIs"Business Week magazine is looking at social networking sites opening their APIs to third-party developers to enable social applications not supported by the network itself. Facebook is setting an example by releasing their API from beta into 1.0, and many others are expected to follow the suit. Quoting from the article: 'Since Facebook, a network of 17 million college students, started a pilot program last summer, third-party developers have created some 100 new applications. Now a Facebook user name and password can be used to log in to content-sharing and chat site Mosoto, and to automatically import Facebook friends into Mosoto's buddy list for chat. Facebook itself does not offer a chat function.'"
To be honest, I thought the facebook thing was a joke at first. Who'd use it? But apparently, social networking sites are all opening up for mashups (with the exception of myspace). It sounds like the main motivation is to hang on to users. Remember data is the new Intel Inside.