Last night, Steve and I attended a wonderfully insightful presentation of the Bebo platform. The main take-away was that the differences between Bebo and Facebook are minimal. Therefore we are going to add support for Bebo to the Openface framework. If anyone is interested in providing input, let us know.
More on the presentation: The presenter, Blake Commagere of Vampires, Zombies, and Werewolves fame, gave multiple reasons why porting your Facebook app to Bebo may be preferable to using a cross platform framework such as Openface. One of the reasons was that most users don't care if they can log into multiple networks and see the same information. Additionally, Bebo has done a great job of supporting most Facebook features, so the work is minimal. Blake said he only had to write about 100 lines of code.
That said, audience members offered support for a cross platform framework like Openface because they said cross platform connections helped increase their network effect. For example, presenter John Smart said that Zoosk, an online dating application benefited greatly by having the largest possible user base, which means going cross platform with a single database. We couldn't agree more better.
So in the end, there are benefits and disadvantages with each option. Our goal with Openface is to make it so simple to support cross platform networks that you don't have to make that choice.
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