Facebook vs. OpenSocial

Just read AppScout's post about how Facebook has announced their own version of OpenSocial, in an obvious move to compete with Google's initiative. I myself haven't done any developing for Facebook, but I wanted to put in my own two cents about what this could mean for OpenSocial.

It seems that Facebook, who already has a developer API in place, will win the race to get the API open to other Social Networking sites. This will push developers thinking of creating social network applications (SNAPPS) but waiting for OpenSocial so that their apps will be available on other networks in the direction of developing for Facebook. OpenSocial is in the sandbox/testing phase through Orkut, but not fully "open" yet.

Furthermore, developers who already create apps for Facebook will have little reason to even glance toward OpenSocial's direction. Facebook is just such a dominator in the Social Networking space. Granted, MySpace has announced their support for OpenSocial, which would be a draw as well, if it weren't for the fact that MySpace seems to be less of a site for SNAPPS than Facebook. Why is that? It's fair to assume that there will indeed be a great influx of programmers to develop for MySpace once OpenSocial is ready, though they will probably look a little different, as they will likely be geared toward a younger crowd.

If I were to start developing SNAPPS, though I am always very fond of open source initiatives and Google in general, I would be very tempted to go the Facebook route. It will be interesting to see how OpenSocial fares against this new initiative by Facebook.

Firefox is CSS-picky

It's a good thing, though.

Sometimes, when you are creating a layout in Firefox using CSS instead of tables (good for you!), and you are choosing to use position:relative; rather than the float property, you run into a problem where, if you have multiple links side by side, Firefox only allows the very last one to be clickable, and uses their heights as a sort of invisible mask to put over the rest of the links on the line (or, to be specific, within the same block-level element).

This occurs because, somewhere in your code, you probably have a block-level element tag that is missing the positioning style definition. That is, make sure all of your block-level elements have position:relative applied; it doesn't seem to cascade in the way to make sure your page elements will always have their own space to themselves, links being clickable and all.

Hope this clears some future headaches!