TECHCRUNCH
ERICK SCHONFELD
24 MARCH 08
For those of you who thought OpenSocial was going to make things easy for developers who want to create social networking apps once and deploy them everywhere, think again. More splintering is occurring. Tonight, rising music social network imeem
(an original member of OpenSocial) is releasing its own software development kit for programmers to create applications on imeem. Imeem is not abandoning OpenSocial, it is just that programmers will be able to build a lot cooler apps using the new imeem Media Platform. But don’t worry, support for OpenSocial is “coming soon.”
So what’s so special about this API that would make programmers bother to take the effort? It offers access to imeem’s vast music library and all the profile data of its 24 million members worldwide (comScore says 19 million, but who’s counting?). It is also the same platform that imeem itself uses to creates its own applications. CEO Dalton Caldwell realizes he is not going to convince developers to ditch Facebook or OpenSocial, but he does think he is offering something unique enough to pique their interest.
