Google to out open FaceBook and unleash the Brazillians

TechCrunch reports that Google will "out open" FaceBook in November as they release APIs to iGoogle and Orkut as a first step. Orkut is famously, or infamously, because Brazillian quickly much to the apparent surprise of Google and the "cool kids" who first rushed to the social networking site as it was growing.

Michael Arrlington further writes:

The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.

On November 5 we’ll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut’s social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more - such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs. And Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform - meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.

Dare Obasanjo adds some more detailed insight and speculation on his blog.