Google/OpenSocial's director of engineering David ...

While at Bebo's launch event yesterday in San Francisco, I had a chance to catch up with David Glazer, the director of engineering at Google who is overseeing the evolution of the OpenSocial framework that the company announced on November 1, 2007. You can see the interview in the attached video (above). Bebo claims to be the third largest social network in the world behind MySpace and Facebook and also claims to be the most popular social network in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. Glazer's attendance to the Bebo event was particularly interesting given that one of Bebo's key messages from yesterday's launch was how applications that are written to run on FaceBook will run without any recoding on Bebo. The FaceBook developer platform is by no means a standard in terms of programmable social networks. But Bebo's choice to be API-compatible with FaceBook in many ways proves why a standard for interoperability between social networks (interoperability of the sort that's the supposed province of the OpenSocial framework) can be important. For more on this, visit: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=939