Mark Cuban, Facebook, and OpenSocial
Mark Cuban is, as usual, insightful when he describes the potential of Facebook profiles to be used as the basis for smarter social applications outside of Facebook. His call for a truly open Facebook API is a must-read for anyone thinking about open social networks.
Context & Ripple Effects
Mark Cuban's call for a truly open Facebook API, published November 4 and picked up by O'Reilly Radar the next day, lands one week after Google launched OpenSocial as a set of common APIs meant to run social applications across many sites at once — the framing Marc Andreessen sketched in his October 31 post about a new universe of social apps across the web. The Radar write-up treats Cuban's argument as the sharpest counterpoint yet in that debate.
The stakes are Facebook's own platform strategy: its August developer-platform launch made outside applications central to the network, but only inside it, and Cuban's case rests on Facebook profiles being unusually authentic data worth building smarter services around. Coverage of what Google OpenSocial really means notes some 50 million Facebook users are reported indifferent to OpenSocial APIs, while Facebook has signaled — unconfirmed — that it isn't afraid of the effort and might even join it. Facebook's Project Beacon advertising announcement, confirmed for ad:tech in New York this week, adds a second front where control over user data is being decided.
First-order effects
- Facebook faces direct pressure from Cuban's argument to license or open its API beyond its own container, since the value he identifies — authentic profiles — is only monetizable if outside developers get access.
- Developers building on OpenSocial now have a named alternative path to the same social data, making Facebook's closed API the visible differentiator between the two platforms.
Second-order effects
- Other social networks backing OpenSocial can position themselves as the open option against Facebook, forcing Zuckerberg's team to respond either by deepening openness or by doubling down on proprietary advantages like Beacon's ad targeting.
- If profile data becomes licensable rather than captive, the market shifts toward whoever brokers access — an API-licensing layer sitting between networks and application developers.
Third-order effects
- The dispute sketches the structural question of the next platform cycle: whether the social graph remains a walled-garden asset controlled per network or becomes shared infrastructure licensed across the web, with authenticity of identity data as the scarce resource.
- Regulators and users alike gain a template here — the fight over who may build on personal-profile data prefigures broader battles over data portability and platform gatekeeping.
The trend: Late 2007's platform war between Facebook's closed developer ecosystem and Google's OpenSocial coalition is turning profile data itself into the contested asset that will decide how open social networking becomes.