With the emergence of cross-social-network developer platforms (first Google’s OpenSocial and then Bebo’s Facebook clone) comes the possibility for applications to connect people across social networks, thereby blurring the lines that designate where one social graph ends and another begins.

Out of the handful of applications on Bebo’s private (and soon-public) platform, one called Bunchball has earned the honor of becoming the first social network application to actually connect users of two social networks (Facebook and Bebo), and synchronously at that.

Bunchball consists of a set of Flash-based games: pool, arcade trivia, chess, sudoku, etc. When you initiate a game, you can choose to be matched with people from any social network that supports Bunchball (currently only Facebook and Bebo, but before long Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, Orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, and Six Apart as well). You can also opt to just play people from within your current social network (Facebook in my case) or just your college, workplace, region, etc.

I don’t presume that it was very hard for the developers of Bunchball to match users up across social networks once they had established the application on both Facebook and Bebo. Nor do I have any reason to believe that it really made a difference, as far as cross-network interactivity goes, that these two social networks essentially share the same platform. What seems to have mattered most is that numerous social networks have begun to make themselves available to developers, a trend that will accelerate as OpenSocial rolls out more fully in 2008. As this happens, we will see many more applications connect users regardless of their chosen social network, simply because they can run the same applications in several social environments and they have no reason to wall themselves off from each within which they reside.

Furthermore, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this happen in more substantial ways than just matching people up for games. Third-party applications may end up substantially downplaying the importance of each particular social network as they replicate the same functionality across networks. This trend may emerge particularly strongly if the social networks themselves resist opening up their social graphs to other networks while users demand interoperability. Whose to say that profiles and lists themselves may not end up being managed by third-party applications that conform to open standards? It’s not inconceivable, especially if one expects the social networks to continue their rush to please developers by providing them with ever-greater accessibility and tools with which to work.

I originally wrote about Bunchball during the Web 2.0 conference last fall. They relaunched their product on February 1, 2006

The core technology is the same, but bunchball has changed their interface, focus and messaging. From their profile request:

We’re a place for users to come play multi-player Flash “games” with small groups of friends, or easily take them and put them into their own web pages and blogs, to play with their visitors.

This is the important new thing about Bunchball that we added after the Web 2.0 conference (along with a completely new, 100x better UI) - the ability to take any game and put it into a web page.

Games can be anything from arcade type games to chat, to photo and music sharing.

For developers, we provide quick deployment of existing games (minutes), and an API to our multi-player platform - giving them more opportunities to have their games be viral and the ability to create multiplayer games faster than ever before.

The focus is now on allowing people to easily create flash games, and syndicate them to the edge on blogs and websites. I’ve embedded a version of Asteroids below, which is playable on this site. Games can be multi-player, and chat is integrated. I hope bunchball doesn’t pull an “ajchat” on me and break down.

Bunchball was founded by Rajat Paharia and Sunil Singh and is based in silicon valley.

For Orli:

The Web 2.0 conference kicked off today with a number of great workshops. The highlights for us were the Attention Trust board meeting (posts below) and, of course, the Launchpad workshop where a dozen companies presented in an hour and a half.

My notes on each company are below. Many of these have been profiled here before, and we hope to get full profiles of the rest up as soon as we can schedule interviews with the teams (if you’d like to talk to me, I’m the guy with a huge TechCrunch sticker on my laptop) (Jeff Clavier also has a TechCrunch sticker on his laptop, but I’m not French, so you’ll know its not me ).

I’m breaking this down into two posts to keep it manageable. Here’s Part 1. Part 2 is here.

Social Text

Ross Mayfield spoke about wikiwyg, the first wysiwyg editor for wikis. He says its much more than a tool for wikis, however. It’s and “open source synchronous editor for the web” and his vision is that it will be used on many web applications beyond wikis. Want to try out Social Text for free? Mention web2con at socialtext and get a free five-user wiki for a year.

Rollyo

Dave Pell presented Rollyo, the roll-your-own search engine (profile).

You can create a mini-search engine from only those sites you trust or feel have relevant content, and then search against that personal search. He used a travel search example that was quite compelling - searching against just fodors, travelpost and frommers. Saved searches can be private, or public and shared with others.

Joyent

David Young talked about Joyent, a compelling network suite for small groups and companies that includes mail, calendar, contacts, files, etc., and allows developers to mash up systems on their data. Lots of tagging and “smart filters”. Open APIs to allow third party apps. Take the tour here.

bunchball

Rajat Paharia showed off his super-cool flash platform BunchBall. Rajat was also nice enough to give me a personal presentation earlier in the day. Rajat talked about how developers need both infrastructure and distribution to get applications out. BunchBall provides both - a slick flash platform (Flash 8 is required for some applications) along with open APIs, and new third party applications are automatically distributed accross the platform.

Current applications include a number of games and photo-sharing. Rajar also says that Metaliq is creating a multi user texas holdem game, to be released soon.

Check this one out. And contrary to rumors, Rajat did NOT beat me at tic-tac-toe while giving me the demo. He lies.

RealTravel

Ken Leeder talked about his new company, RealTravel. It’s centralized user content with some really sweet tagging and search/find capabilities .

The idea is to leverage user content and social networking to create a personalized experience for travel shoppers and a more effective venue for travel industry marketeres. THus, hopefully, breaking the death spiral that the online travel industry is now in: a race to the lowest price.

Zimbra

Satish Dharmara gave an absolutely stellar presentation of Zimbra (profile), although to be honest Zimbra is so damn cool and full of AJax awesomeness that he could have stood there and babbled and the audience would still have cheered.

Zimbra is an “open source enterprise-scalable collaboration server with intelligent online backup and single mailbox restore. It has hierarchical storage management”. What does this mean? You can’t run it from the Zimbra website, but you can install it on your own server. It’s Outlook as it’s supposed to be.

Read our profile. It (Zimbra, not our profile) rocks. Demo here.