Following the December announcement that social network Bebo was aligning itself to the Facebook platform, the company announced today that the Bebo Open Application Platform is “100% open” meaning that any 3rd party developer can deploy their applications on Bebo.
Previously the Bebo platform was only available to a select group of media and developer partners, including NBC Universal, CBS, NBA, Yahoo!, RockYou, Slide, and others. As of now, there are 63 apps in their Developer website – Bebo obviously hopes to ramp this up quickly now that anyone can develop apps.
As we noted in December, the Bebo platform is almost identical to Facebook’s – it is nearly 100% compatible, in that the APIs, markup language, and query language are all the same. So Bebo is supporting Facebook Platform standards currently. Having said that, Bebo still supports Google’s competing standard OpenSocial – or at least they will when OpenSocial is ready for action. It’s unclear at this point how Bebo will be able to support what is shaping up to be two competing standards!
Bebo has a reported 40 million users and it is the leading social network in countries like UK and New Zealand. Practically speaking, Bebo will be relying on its support of Facebook standards to increase their third party apps well past 63. Facebook has thousands of third party apps, so Bebo is banking on a lot of those getting added to Bebo too.
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