Friendster has announced that it will be entering the third stage of opening the Friendster global social network by confirming that the Friendster Developer Program will launch in November, and that developers can now access the initial set of APIs and the testing environment.
To provide equal opportunity for developers around the world to “compete” for mindshare and adoption by Friendster’s more than 50 million users, developers will have more than one month to build and integrate their widgets with Friendster before they are published in Friendster’s widget directory on November 30.
This third stage of opening the Friendster global social network includes:
•Non-proprietary platform: The Developer Program includes APIs compatible with those used in the industry, consistent with Friendster’s philosophy that existing social widgets should be easily deployed on Friendster. This platform allows a rich set of widgets to be developed by opening access to Friendster data and seamless integration points within the Friendster Web site.
•Open revenue model: Widgets can include any and all models for monetization, and no revenue share with Friendster will be required.
•Support for existing widgets: Widget developers may continue to use their existing flash and HTML widgets on Friendster without investing development effort to modify the design or user experience of their widget.
•Widget directory: Users will browse, discover, preview and add widgets via a new Widget Directory.
•Viral support: When adding a widget, this user-initiated event will appear in the “My Network Activity” module (that summarizes a user’s activity for their friends in the network), which will virally promote a given widget to the user’s friends.
•Developer community feedback: Additional API calls will be added to the Developer Program over time, with strong preference given to those API calls requested by the community of developers.
“Friendster is making it easy for the existing ecosystem of hundreds of widget developers to market and distribute their widgets to Friendster users – and for Friendster users to easily discover, add and modify widgets in their profile pages,” said David Jones, vice president of marketing for Friendster.
“In addition, the Friendster Developer Program will enable thousands of new developers to rapidly build and integrate widgets, including dynamic new widgets with unique and compelling features for our users.”
“Since we know that widget companies and developers want an equal opportunity and a level playing field on which to compete for the attention of Friendster’s 50 million users, Friendster is announcing and publishing our plans, APIs and information on our Developer Program in advance of the date on which these capabilities will be activated,” said Jones.
“The developer community will start the race for Friendster user adoption on the same date: November 30.”
Some of the largest companies in the industry have piloted the Friendster Developer Program and, as a result, beginning today Friendster users will have access to an initial set of dozens of widgets that were part of the pilot testing of the Widget Directory. This pilot version will be significantly enhanced with filtering, sorting and other features by November 30.
This is the third stage of Friendster opening up its global social network. The first stage was implemented in August 2006, when Friendster opened the Profile page, enabling users to add HTML and flash widgets to personalize their profiles and share content with their friends on Friendster. The second stage, announced in September 2007, opened Friendster.com to over 40 categories of artists and organizations interested in building a fan base within the Friendster global community via Fan Profiles. Fan Profiles are a new type of profile on Friendster that open up the viral power of the Friendster social network to entities by giving them an enhanced set of promotional features. In the current third stage, developers can build new widgets for Friendster members as well as for the entities that have Fan Profiles, helping to take artist and organization promotion and distribution to new levels.
“Since Friendster is the third-largest branded social network in the world and No. 1 in Asia, it is no surprise to Friendster that hundreds of leading widget companies have already expressed interest in participating in a Friendster program like this, even before it was announced or launched,” said Jones. |
