The big news out there today is that bebo has announced their new platform will be facebook compatible. This was quickly followed by news that Facebook is opening up the architecture of their platform to everyone else.

So what does this mean? It means Bebo has some smart people working there who know a good thing when they see it. I would probably not have paid much attention to it had they not done this, even with future opensocial support.  This move also means that OpenSocial even though it was obscenely hyped, and a lot of people were salivating over it, is no where near ready and people aren’t willing to wait for it.  Its one thing for an Orkut to wait around for OpenSocial, since they are owned by google, but to the rest of the SocNets, time is of the essence.

Surprisingly Friendster in all the hubub the last few days announced their own platform, but didn’t pursue this route. I guess they didn’t think they needed to.