So much is changing in the widget world at breakneck speed, I thought it would be helpful and fun to start a weekly update on Widget-land and Widgetbox (with some commentary thrown in for good measure).  I'll keep these short and sweet, so y'all can get the top widget news super fast (and dare I say in bite-sized chunks?)

So, with that, here's the update from the Widgetsphere!

The biggest news this week comes out of the Social Networks.  As I wrote about earlier, Bebo launched its Open Application Platform on Wednesday.  While this is big enough news just on its own, as it sets Bebo up to be the 2nd truly open Social Network (after Facebook), where this gets really interesting is that Bebo worked closely with Facebook to make their apps platform compatible with Facebook's f8.  On that same day, Facebook turned around and announced that it would make what has been its proprietary hold on f8 available to other players in the market.  Now, given that Bebo took Facebook's FBML and FQL and made them into SNML and SNQL, it seems to me that Bebo might also have been thinking about making a licensing play here.  Will this turn into a battle of the application platform licensing?  However this all shakes down, it will definitely be interesting to watch.

At the same time, Friendster launched its own application platform.  The gaping hole in all of this excitement?  None of these folks have made any big moves to integrate OpenSocial, even through they are signed on to support it. OpenSocial is still very alpha (yes, this post is old, but I don't believe much has changed in the OpenSocial APIs since then), and as others have discussed, none of the OpenSocial containers have gotten very far.  We launched our own OpenSocial support last week, but the available functionality is definitely limited until the containers are up and running. 

Certainly, it is interesting that Bebo and Friendster chose to continue their work on their own platforms, rather than move that work over to the OpenSocial APIs first.  Strategically, of course this makes sense for them - what they have done is much more integrated with their own sites, and therefore much more compelling for their users.  Some have claimed that Google's OpenSocial announcement was a lot of PR might, with not a lot of foundation built under it yet.  At this point, I am inclined to agree.