Update: Facebook pulls a Microsoft and embraces and extends by opening their platform to other social sites like Bebo. Very smart and unexpected. More info at Facebook to let other sites access platform code.

This month's regular Facebook Meetup was held at Google and the topic of the day was OpenSocial. For those of you with real lives, OpenSocial "provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites." Over 200 excited people, hoping to do very exciting things, and dreaming of making an exciting pile of money, watched an OpenSocial presentation put on by a couple of appropriately knowledgeable evangelists. I could feel my social graph being more successfully monetized with each passing minute.

Normally the meetings are much smaller, but Google puts on a very nice spread, so I think people may have showed up to dine :-) Or they could have showed up to learn why and how they should code to the new uber social API. By the looks of the full plates and the sounds of energetic chatter, it was likely a bit of both. The crowd seemed skeptical, yet interested. The Facebook world is somewhat self satisfied and that comfy world was being disturbed. It might get ugly I thought, but unfortunately it stayed quite civil and informative. With my bread I had hoped for a bit of circus.

My take on OpenSocial: code social application once, run anywhere.