Ganging Up on Facebook

Yesterday I read this interesting article titled Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook. The basis of the article was Google’s new alliances, which they hope will give them a way to take on Facebook. Specifically, Facebook’s recent decision to allow developers the ability to write against the Facebook platform API. The article states that Google will “introduce a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning.” As a software engineer I am fascinated by the potential this has for creating valuable applications that have both social networking value as well as business productivity value.