FriendFeed, a site which enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing, tries to attract new users through it’s claim that their site offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends. Okay, so what is the brand new way to attract users? News feeds have become an essential part of many of our lives - I couldn’t get the amount of work done in a day that I do right now without them.

The interesting part about FriendFeed is that it creates a feed with the news, interests and activities they have been up to lately. All you have to do is connect them together which is what we want in the long run so that we don’t have to spend a lot of time reading through many pages. Some days you just don’t have the time so a feed is an intelligent and time-saving alternative. What makes the whole idea even better is that your friends can share their thoughts and comments in the same feed so you can put all of the information in one place.

Now FriendFeed is opening up their application to developers with their new FriendFeed API which allows programmers to interact with the site programmatically. So the featrues can be taken and built into a mobile phone application, a widget for a blog or whatever the imaginative minds out there can build with social network features. Python and PHP client libraries have been made available so if this is up your alley, there’s nothing stopping you now.

FriendFeed website
FriendFeed Blog
FriendFeed API documentation

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That’s right, Yahoo! is joining up with Google and MySpace to announce an agreement to form the OpenSocial Foundation to pave the path for a specification which is open and community-governed that will create a framework for building social applications across websites. This is a large developemnt as the potential for developers is immense: over 500 million people worldwide will be able to be reached through social applications and it is not shrinking in size.

The OpenSocial Foundation itself will be a non-profit and independently run organization which will “provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform” according to the press release.

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