Growing Demand Blog

There’s been quite a bit of talk the last few days about Facebook’s new Open Stream API. We’ve also been discussing it throughout our offices, as we’re usually the first in line to incorporate services like Facebook Connect and the Twitter API into our properties and our platforms.

While this move toward openness by Facebook is clearly a welcome step, there are many in our industry wondering how significant or revolutionary Open Stream will be.  Open Stream effectively untethers the core Facebook experience from Facebook.com. However, it appears likely that this experience, while portable, will be kept largely intact, no matter where it shows up.

While there will be some developers who are able to twist the API into new and interesting experiences, it appears that most of the action will end up around building alternative Facebook clients. Expect to see a range of desktop and mobile apps turn up in the first wave. Some will be different than your Facebook.com home page, and some will just be different looking.

Without the ability for developers to adapt Facebook stream information to the context of a specialized application or content topic, it seems unlikely that Open Stream will, in its initial incarnation, enable a vibrant ecosystem of completely new and novel applications as we’ve seen with Twitter. Consider Twitter API hall-of-famers like Summize (acquired by Twitter), Twitterholic and StockTwits. It’s not apparent that any of these kinds of applications (or many of our favorite Twitter apps) are possible with Open Stream.

As long as we’re making comparisons to Twitter’s API, it’s worth noting that Twitter has the powerful advantage of search, which lets developers filter, slice and dice, from among the millions upon millions of natively public Twitter status updates, each associated with public profile information. Facebook on the other hand, even with a search capability, currently allows you to return posts from the user’s network of friends – and only that user can see that content.

Facebook’s double-confirmed friendships are generally tighter, more valuable connections than Twitter Follows. Where this game-changing asset of Facebook’s is a limitation for Twitter in some areas, it’s plain to see that Twitter often benefits wildly from its out-in-the-open, no-walls experience. Open Stream should prove to be an important foundation for Facebook to move to a more distributed model, but the company will have to take great care in navigating to the level of “distributedness” currently enjoyed by Twitter. Facebook’s heritage as a closed-loop social network requires it to tread more lightly in areas that intersect with privacy concerns.

What’s the takeaway for Demand Media and our customers?  In the short run, we’re most likely to benefit from this particular step as end-users of Facebook, because we are going to see interesting new interfaces for reviewing and managing streams of data from our friends. For example, several applications that operate like the popular TweetDeck are likely to roll out soon. But site operators and major brands looking for explosive new opportunities will probably have to wait for the next chess move by Facebook.

Dave Panos is Demand Media’s EVP of Social Media Platforms and CEO of Pluck. Follow Dave at http://www.twitter.com/davepanos.