It is said when you put forward an idea for a bigger fish in the pond to implement, then you must be the first to make an initiation; especially if you are doing something similar; keeping APIs and other data that belongs to none but users. There was a similar statement as pointed out by MG Siegler as he posted Dave Morin, Facebook’s senior platform manager’s post at twitter stating:
The post created quite a stir as it gave various folks in the tech town as they immediately took the chisel to dig out at Facebook; despite the fact the comment was a mere joke. The first comment came from Chris Sacca, former head of special initiatives at Google, stating;
Why don’t you guys show them how it’s done by opening up Facebook mail?
Why in the world would Facebook do that? Open up its API and break the monopoly it has within the social networks? The joke seems to turn away into something worth giving a thought to. There was also a comment by Friendfeed co-founder and former Googler Paul Buchheit stating:
Photos are the biggest thing. Facebook is to a large extent a photo sharing site, but their TOS prohibit you from doing anything interesting with the photos — they’re trapped inside FB.
The present debate that somewhat seems to be getting a new flare is the continuation of the various battles Facebook has been a part of; the most famous being the one with Google. The claims lay quite balanced as Google says its platform (Open Social) is more open for users compared to Facebook, where as Facebook claimed that Google violated user privacy by implementing its methodology.
There can be a difference here; the data present within the government databases is created from the financing being pitched in by the taxpayers (the common man to be precise) and they sort of have a share at ownership of this data. Facebook however isn’t funded that way and it has rights to make its API open or not. One thing here that out weighs Facebook’s stubbornness at locking itself up is that quite a number of folks within Facebook as well as the users have hummed in for opening its API up.
This is just a suggestion, with API o various services switching over to ‘Open’ things haven’t really gone wrong so far and there is a very low probability that they might. There are a lot of advantages that Facebook can capitalize on by implementing this and isn’t Facebook aware of that? The number of applications it has, developed by third parties; making it all more like-able amongst users?
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