In my last post, I mentioned the idea of “situatable software” as a future direction related to Clay Shirky’s idea of “situated software.”
Well, to be honest I’m still not sure if the concept of “situatable software” is even a keeper, but since it’s in the air, I’m wondering if it has some intersection with the recent announcement of the Facebook platform.
It wasn’t quite what I was thinking — I had much more an idea of independent application deployment on diverse servers assembled from more fundamental building blocks. But I can imagine a slightly different class of apps in the same basic style that could be installed into something called a platform (admitting for the moment that I haven’t spent much time finding out what Facebook means by the term…). The idea of the widget is expanding into a fertile new area beyond the desktop.
OK, I can’t post just letting the question of what Facebook means dangle, so I had a little look. There are several dozen “applications” (these widgets) already available — was some form of this around earlier than the big announcement? There are apps for Magnolia, Delicious, Last.fm, and Digg.
The presence of these is pretty interesting. A majority of my friends are not real early adopters of these technologies but more than a few of them have set up on at least one of the social networking sites. This architecture brings services like this much closer to their daily consciousness — well, I’m not sure how many of my friends spend a substantial amount of time on SNS’s; I can think of a couple of avid LJ users and a few middling friendster dabblers. But services like this also are substantially more valuable to me than anything I’ve seen in SNS sites, and linking them directly to my network is a major cool multiplier.
By the way, rather than being a “social networking service,” Facebook is calling itself a “social utility,” which is a welcome improvement — these guys have real marketing chops.
The developer web site looks pretty cleanly organized and appears to be thorough from a quick survey. I will report back if I find anything interesting in there…
