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September 9th, 2008 at 9:30 am

Remember Bebo’s open media platform initiative? In short, it means that Bebo users can include premium music and video content in their profiles. At launch, Bebo had a long list of media partners, including BBC, Yahoo, Last.fm, MTV Networks, and ESPN.

Now, the partnership with ESPN is actually visible to users, who can access ESPN’s short videos, including highlights from sport events and short clips from ESPN original programming, through Bebo’s open media platform. The simplest way to find it is to go to this address: www.bebo.com/ESPNVideoSC; unfortunately it all works only if you’re located in the US.

Specifically, this content includes “SportsCenter Right Now, a twice-daily capsule of top sports stories, highlights and breaking news; clips from ESPN programs such as Mike and Mike in the Morning, Pardon the Interruption and Around the Horn; and breaking news and game clips from major professional and college teams and sporting events.”

It’s all nice and dandy, but I always have the feeling that users are being given scraps instead of the real thing: full shows, entire sporting events. This deal certainly won’t hurt Bebo’s Open Media Platform, but from the user’s perspective, it’s really not all that big of a deal.

Source:Mashable!

Gigya Socialize is a widget based connections service for your Web site. It turns any Web site into a social network just by installing the application. Gigya received a major infusion of funding earlier this year, and it seems they have been putting it to good use expanding the capabilities of their service.

Gigya Socialize has been said to be in direct competition with Google’s Friend Connect. That’s true, but it also goes up against MySpace Data Availability and Facebook Connect. Before this round of improvements to the service, it was fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

Now Gigya Socialize can come out swinging and let us know how it will stand up to the competition. It now calls to the API of both MySpace and Facebook. This means that not only can you add social sharing and social networking to your own Web site with the widget, you can integrate your friends lists from the two heavy hitters of the social networking sphere, MySpace and Facebook.

From Gigya regarding the new feature: “Users of sites that incorporate Gigya Socialize will be able to easily enjoy the social features of those sites in conjunction with their MySpace and Facebook friends, by explicitly approving the websites for third party access to their MySpace and Facebook friend lists.”

Being able to have more complete ways to share social graph data on your website, from more social networks, is a step in the right direction for distributed social data. Will Gigya take the place of my preferred OpenSocial? I’m not sure. A lot will depend on how the application affects load times for Web sites.

I like the idea of Gigya Socialize as a way to include your social networks in your site as a full experience. As with anything that involves a component where content is shared, I’m leery of ways it could be abused. In reading the Gigya Socialize EULA I found that while they do not specifically address the concerns of data ownership once data is socially shared by your network, they also don’t stake a claim on it, which is encouraging.

Gigya Socialize offers a few main components: Newsfeed, Invitations, Notifications and a Friend Selector. They also offer a generic Friend Graph API module that more advanced user can customize somewhat more to their needs. The most useful aspect aside from friend integration from multiple networks is the content sharing and being able to track friends.

Pulling in your friend data from MySpace and Facebook using the companies’ own API is a great step toward true social distribution. Gigya Socialize already worked within sites like Facebook as a type of application for sharing content, this is just the next logical step.