There are over 33,000 Facebook applications (as of 7/08). In order to develop a Facebook application, a developer must be proficient in several languages including PHP (or Java) and JavaScript. In addition, the developer has to learn new technologies including FBML, FQL, Mock AJAX. There is an opportunity to significantly reduce the amount of effort involved in the initial learning and development as well as on-going maintenance of these applications.

In addition, OpenSocial is a strong alternative to the Facebook API but requires a completely different applicatin architecture. Developers find it time consuming to support both APIs in one application. This is analogous to the multi-platform support challenges of UNIX. There is no solution today to help ease this pain and we feel there is a significant opportunity to solve this problem.

The Openface Project is a PHP framework used for building applications that run on Facebook and OpenSocial platforms. Openface is a set of libraries that you add into your PHP application that enables the same codebase to run within Facebook, Bebo and OpenSocial containers like MySpace, Hi5 & Orkut.

To join the project discussion, visit our Group at http://groups.google.com/group/openface.

Best, Dave & Steve