Seeing as some of the biggest social networks are now opening up API’s which will allow developers to really add value to their sites by doing the leg work for them and mashing other sources of data together with them. Both Facebook and Friendster have announced plans to open up access to their API’s. It’s a smart move as this will bring added value for their users, encourage new users to sign up and therefore increase revenues for them. MySpace, Google (with Orkut) and professional networks such as Linkedin are expected to quickly follow suit.
This could produce some very cool apps indeed! I’d like to see something that mashes the user data up from all of them and attempts to pair a MySpace profile with it’s Linkedin profile, could be very telling (and quite humorous results would ensue no doubt).
It will also make creating widgets for MySpace etc a much more open process and the widgets could get really useful.
