If Facebook and MySpace would open up a little bit, imagine how nice it would be to send your status across multiple services. For instance, I like having Twitter for it’s stand-alone “what am I doing” style status. It would be nice if I could tell Facebook and MySpace to import a status RSS feed from Twitter, which it already has available for anyone to use. For you still not quite up to speed on web trends, that would basically pull anything I posted on twitter to be displayed on Facebook and MySpace so I didn’t have to login to multiple networks.

Why isn’t this happening now? Probably stubborness to keep you on one social network and not drift to others. Most of these sites make the majority of their revenue serving adverts on your pages – just like TV commercials but the majority of them have content and services you don’t have to pay for. Now I honestly don’t think it really would have a huge impact on revenue to add this – infact, I know I’d rather use a service that was more open to making it easier for their users.

Unfortunately, services like Pownce, Twitter, del.icio.us and more aren’t being utilized by average internet users. Don’t get me wrong – these sites have a large database of users, but they’re still not touching your average teenage to adolescent userbase in areas like the midwest – and while I know few users in my area taking advantages of these services, almost everyone has both a Facebook and a MySpace. If the demand was there, I’m sure we’d see even more support across websites and services.

There’s so many ideas that would be very neat if implemented to provide support and data across networks. Unforunately, data always has a price and everyone wants it, no matter how mundane it seems to you.

And one last thing, as a side note. Facebook and MySpace are virtually the same anymore – including both having applications which you’ll see rolling out on MySpace very soon. I’ve been tinkering with the opensocial API (I signed up for the dev program after writing my last post on API) and it’s easy enough to use that I’d put a pretty good wager on you’ll start getting those invites you hate on Facebook in your MySpace inbox any day here.

API’s are all over the place and you’re most likely using one. Why am I talking about API’s? Because there are some websites that either don’t have them in place, they’re not easily accessable, or they’re handicapped in performance and don’t allow you to do much. Facebook’s API is wonderful. You can very easily, with little programming knowledge at all, create a very simple application.

MySpace on the other hand, I’m not so sure of. Google developed something called opensocial, which MySpace jumped on board for. Typically anything Google touches turns to gold and I’m a huge fan of the company – hell, they turned a search box into one of the biggest companies on the internet. (Yes, I’m using the term search box and of course know that’s a bit of an understatement.)

I haven’t taken the time to delve into the API much yet, and I’m a little concerned about doing so. While the idea is good, opensocial is, as the name might imply, very open. And the more open you are on the internet, the more vulnerable you are. One of the first sites to use opensocial was cracked within 20 minutes of going live with the API and allowed attackers to view private information. I would have prefered that MySpace had developed it’s own API with a bit more limits. Had they done so, I would have liked to have seen the following features.

*Pulling content from blog posts.

*Pulling content from bulletin posts, in a similar fashion.

*Pulling content from events and calendars.

*Providing a means to pull albums and specific pictures from a users profile.

These are very basic requests and would only be allowed on public profiles. Why would this work well? Because beyond the standard users of MySpace, there is a large amount of musician, comedian, commercial, and soon celebrity profiles. While I could care less about most of these, a solid API would simplify things for smaller bands on the web.

I’m currently doing the coding for a website for a local band in my area. If I had access to these tools, they could post news/events/photos on their MySpace page and have them appear on their website. They’re still allowed a professional web prescense of their own while being able to keep their fans & friends on MySpace updated at all times and able to communicate with them via that platform.

Anyways – I don’t know. I felt it was time for a good rant, but it’s becoming obvious I’m out of practice as my hands are starting to cramp up and this has been an unbelievably nerdy post of no worth. Until next time.