Microsoft/Yahoo/Facebook rumors

The blogosphere is buzzing today with rumors on Microsoft intending to buy just the Search portion of Yahoo and then buying Facebook. It's a strange world we are living in, but some argue that the move appears to make sense in a twisted sort-of way.

This should be an interesting week...

Google's Open Social API - is this the end of Facebook?

Google is holding a press conference right now, and it appears that they have everybody's support for the new Open Social API in an attempt to stem the popularity of Facebook among 3rd party Web 2.0 application developers. Supporting sites include MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Friendster, etc.

UPDATE: Full text of press release here.

TechCrunch has reported on this topic before and has some details on what the APIs contain.

Marc Andreessen also writes about the API and concludes that the Open Social API is "the next big leap forward". He cites two big differences compared to the Facebook APIs: (a) with Open Social API there can me more than one container, whereas with the Facebook API there is always only one container (i.e. Facebook); (b) the Facebook API requires the use of FBML and FQL, whereas with the Open Social API developers can use any standard HTML and JavaScript.

I haven't seen the actual Open Social API documentation yet, but I bet it'll be using XML all over the place. Good news for the XML Aficionado... ☺

Microsoft in talks to buy a stake in Facebook

The Wall Street Journal reported just now that Microsoft is in talks with Facebook to acquire a 5% stake in the company. The deal is said to result in a valuation for Facebook of $10 billion.

Both Google and Microsoft are said to have been in negotiations with Facebook at one time or the other, but Microsoft has an advantage at the moment, due to an exclusive agreement with Facebook to deliver ads to Facebook users that was signed last year and runs until 2011.

Question: why wouldn't either Google or Microsoft want to buy all of Facebook instead of just a 5% stake?

Answer (according to the Wall Street Journal):

"Microsoft has considered trying to buy the company outright, but people familiar with the matter said it's unlikely at this time. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has steadfastly kept his company independent with the goal of eventually taking the company public. In a round of negotiations last year, Mr. Zuckerberg rebuffed acquisition approaches from Microsoft, Yahoo and others."

See also my previous article "Facebook: it's not just for kids anymore..." on my XML Aficionado blog.

Also seen in Valleywag and TechCrunch today.

UPDATE: New posting in the WSJ Deal Blog has an interview with Bo Peabody, the 36-year-old founder of Tripod Inc. - one of the first social networks, all the way back in 1992.

Mash: Yahoo's new social networking site

Yahoo has launched Mash as a beta version (by invitation only) this weekend. It's (yet another) social networkig site that appears to be aimed at unseating Facebook, and their biggest differentiator is a wiki-like approach where people can edit each other's profiles. More importantly, you can create a new profile for somebody else and then inite them to "claim" that profile and make it theirs.

Hmmmm, I'm not sure that I really like that idea. Friends writing on my wall in Facebook is one thing, but having them edit my profile?!

Most things on Mash seem to definitely still be very much in beta stage, e.g. when I tried to import my Gmail address book to see how many of my 1,500 contacts are also on Mash, I got the following error:

"We could not find contacts from Gmail for you to add."

I guess we'll have to see how this evolves before we can pass a verdict. In the meantime, if you want to take a look, here is my Mash profile page...

Facebook: it's not just for kids anymore... (and it does XML, too)

Social networking sites have taken off over the last few years, and for a long time there seemed to be a clear divide: Doostang, Ecademy, LinkedIn, and Xing for business networking vs. Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace for kids (be it high-school or college). Plus every network had their own particular and sometimes even unique focus (e.g. Musicians on MySpace, Harvard and MIT grads on Doostang, and lots of Europeans on Xing).

But things are not so simple anymore. As Facebook grows in popularity amongst "business types" due to several unique features that set it apart from the likes of LinkedIn (more on that later), the character of the network changes and it also gives rise to some interesting generation-conflict issues, such as in Liz Ryan's recent article "Worlds Colliding: My Mom's on Facebook!" in the BusinessWeek Career Insight column.

So what are these unique features that set Facebook apart from the rest of the social networking sites? There's been plenty of talk about Facebook in the blogosphere already, so I won't recite it all. Instead, I'll just say that it was these things that got me excited:

• Great UI design: the user interface is clean, customizable, and elegant - yet is provides for an environment that is actually fun to work with. Very much unlike MySpace (chaos) or Doostang (boring)! LinkedIn and Xing are not necessarily bad in their UI design, but Facebook is simply so much better. Designing a great user interface is just as important for Web 2.0 applications, as it was for regular desktop software. What can I say: when it comes to Altova's developer tools I've always been working hard to ensure we invest in the best UI design (and as a result, I regularly hear "XMLSpy rocks" or similar comments when I talk to people at conferences or trade shows).


• Open platform that uses XML: 3rd party developers can add to it, and masses of developers are already flocking to the platform. Facebook applications are using FBML (Facebook Markup Language), which extends HTML by additional FBML elements (in the fb: namespace) that are described by this XML Schema (yes, I know, they call it a DTD, but it's really an XML Schema - I should tell them to use the DTD and XML Schema tools in XMLSpy to fix this). In addition to the FBML describing the user interface, the 3rd party applications call a Facebook API, where most parameters and results are transmitted in XML (e.g. see the description of the Events.getMembers API call).


• Privacy control: it has much more fine-grained controls on what information I want to share with friends, the network, or everyone. Only Xing is still slightly better than Facebook in this regard, because of its European roots.


• Flexible integration: it allows me to integrate my blog and new postings are automatically part of my Facebook news feed. In the same way I can integrate my photos (SmugMug), videos (YouTube), and other content. While some of the other networks only allow me to post a maximum of 3 links (LinkedIn), Facebook allows me to link as many web sites as I want and lets me directly integrate any RSS feed and have it automatically post to my profile. The only similar offering I've seen so far (other than dedicated news aggregators) is the new Plaxo pulse (beta).

There you have it, I'm going to join Robert Scoble and openly state that I like Facebook. Send me a friend request, when you get your account set up...