Marty Wells of Tangler (and a Citizen Agency client) has some great thoughts on Facebook’s usurping of MySpace’s opportunity to set the standard API of the social web. Basically, that Facebook came out with their API first means that they dictate the standard calls and features that everyone else will now have to offer parity with.
Joshua and the Delicious folks found themselves in a similar situation — delaying Flock’s rolling out of privacy in favorites even though Shadows had long since supported the feature in its API. And more recently, Ma.gnolia will be mirroring the Delicious API to speed up Flock integration. In the case of another incumbent, Photobucket mirrored Flickr’s API to push Flock integration.
In these and other cases, the sooner you go open, the sooner you reap the benefits. And, I have to admit, I’m happy that it was Facebook to make a move first.
Factory Joe 
“Ma.gnolia will be mirroring the Delicious API” Awesome! It’s about time. (Scuttle did this long ago.)
Thanks Pete – we’re hoping this will help not only for Flock but other developers with Delicious-integrated apps who might want to support other services.
We wanted to first develop our own API to take advantage of the unique aspects of Ma.gnolia, and to just do things the way we believe works best. The standard Ma.gnolia API, which will continue to exist and grow beside the Delicious mirror API, has gotten some praise around the web, most enthusiastically from Jeff Croft (http://www2.jeffcroft.com/2006/may/07/delicious-magnolia/). Ideally people will be able to move apps to Ma.gnolia quickly, then start looking at what else they can do with the service that might not work in Delicious.
And… Ma.gnolia has now mirrored the del.icio.us api; check out the Ma.gnolia blog for the full scoop.