Has Google’s OpenSocial arrived too late to stop social networking sites joining the stampede of developers to Facebook’s platform?

Bebo, number one in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand and the number three social networking site in the US, says its Open Application Platform is a straight use of Facebook’s application programming interfaces, the advantage being that, with the minimum of effort, developers of thousands of applications for Facebook could now make them available on Bebo as well.

In an entry on its developer wiki, Facebook announced the next step in the opening up of its platform, which began in May when outside developers were allowed to introduce applications to its service.

“Facebook is now making its platform architecture available as a model for other social sites,” it said.

Michael Birch, chief executive of Bebo, said at the launch of the Open Application Platform that he still supported Google’s OpenSocial initiative for a shared platform architecture for social networking sites, announced last month. But he had also been talking to Facebook and his developers had been focused on making Bebo Facebook-compatible.

He insisted Bebo would get round to adopting OpenSocial, but it seems Facebook’s first-mover advantage has created a critical mass of support from developers that could diminish Google’s efforts.

Facebook is giving away a major advantage in allowing its rivals to mirror its arsenal of applications. This suggests it is both confident of its leadership in innovation and worried about the threat of Google amassing an axis of opposing social networking forces.

MySpace seems firmly in the Google camp, basing its new open platform, due in the New Year, on OpenSocial. But it will be interesting to see whether the smaller players review their commitment to OpenSocial now that Facebook has responded with this giveaway.

For users, the benefits of the new interoperability between Bebo and Facebook include them being able to interact and play with one another.

Bunchball announced its Games and Avatars application, allowing Bebo and Facebook members to play a range of games with one another, while Webs.com said its popular WarBook game would be available to play across the two networks.

While 3D is being adopted by the movie industry as the technology that will put more bums on cinema seats, a new 3D camera being unveiled this week is designed to get people out of their chairs.

The ZCam, developed by the Israeli company 3DV Systems, represents a big advance on the motion-sensing technology currently being used to play video games by gestures rather than punching a controller.

Its array of sensors sends out infra-red pulses to bounce back off objects or a face, sending back information on their distance from the camera to an accuracy of around 5 millimetres and mapping the information to individual screen pixels.

This translates to a "heat map" kind of image where white is close, black is at a distance, while shades of grey create detailed 3D images and allow subtle movements to be picked up at 60 frames per second. Combined with a regular camera imaging chip, a user can pivot his or her face into a 3D colour profile and replace the black background with a movie of a palm-fringed beach or New York skyline, the same way TV weather presenters change their green-screen backgrounds.

3DV, which was founded 10 years ago,  sold a  few  3D cameras to broadcasters for $200,000 in its early days, to allow them to replace backgrounds. Now it expects cameras to appear for less than $100 in the second half of next year and be used as video game peripherals.

Zvika Klier, chief executive, showed me how I could fly a spitfire in a combat game and climb, dive and bank by just pushing my hands back, forward and sideways. Lifting my thumb triggered the machine gun.

Persuading publishers to write games specifically for the peripheral could prove difficult, but 3DV may benefit from a console maker adopting its technology.

Mr Klier sees video conferencing, automotive, security and robotics applications for the camera, but video gamers will benefit first from the total immersion and intuitive movements it makes possible.

3DV has more than 20 patents for its technology and backing from venture capitalists including the Valley’s Kleiner Perkins.

The Nintendo Wii continued its dominance of next-generation console sales in the first week of the US holiday shopping season.

Nintendo says it sold 350,000 of the $250 Wiis in the Thanksgiving week beginning November 18 – its biggest seven-day sales figure since that of the week it launched a year ago.

Microsoft has just reported sales of 310,000 Xbox 360s over the same period. It claimed it outsold Sony’s PlayStation 3 by two to one, citing estimates from top retailers.

Sony must have hoped for better after introducing a cut-price 40-gigabyte version of the console at $399.

It avoided issuing sales figures, but said PS3 sales in the week were up 245 per cent on the same period a year ago, when Sony suffered supply problems and a slow start to its launch.

Sony is currently running new PS3 commercials in its largest marketing effort for the console to date.

What they obviously don’t say is that the Wii is cheaper, the Xbox has a better games line-up and consumers aren’t clear about the benefits of a cheap Blu-ray player being in the PS3, when the standards war with HD-DVD has yet to be resolved.

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in the US, falls this year on its earliest possible date - November 23.

The big day of store sales when retailers are supposed to go into the black for the year also signals the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season.

The latest online retail figures from the comScore research firm suggest the industry will need all those extra days of shopping – Black Friday can fall as late as the 29^th – to avoid a disappointing Christmas.

It reports retail e-commerce sales in October grew 19 per cent on last year to $9.96bn. That compares to year-to-date sales growth of 21 per cent up to the end of September.

Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman, said October’s figures often gave a glimpse of what to expect during the holiday season:

“That online sales growth rates diminished slightly in October is not entirely unexpected, as many consumers are feeling the pinch of ballooning mortgages and gas prices, coupled with a decline in housing values. Even the rapidly growing online commerce sector appears to not be immune from these economic realities,” he said.

Apparel and accessories growing by only 5 per cent in October could be down to unseasonably warm weather, he added, and a recovery in this sector could change the picture for Christmas sales online.

There were also encouraging figures for some categories of retailers. Furniture, appliances and equipment grew 105 per cent on a year ago, while sales of the Nintendo Wii, Sony’s PlayStation 3 price cuts and the success of the game Halo saw the video game sector soar 264 per cent compared to October 2006.

The mobile gaming industry has hit a bump on its road to growth.

Revenues for publishers declined by 9 per cent in the second quarter, compared to the first, when revenues were up 11 per cent on the fourth quarter, according to the iSuppli research firm.

Its report says the pace of growth is slowing and one of the main problems for the industry is the small number of subscribers for mobile games. It suggests the demographic could be widened if games could take advantage of phones and be more networked and multiplayer.

A week ago, shares in Glu Mobile fell 33 per cent after it predicted a fourth-quarter loss of 6 to 7 cents a share, compared to Wall Street expectations of a loss of 2 cents.

It blamed slowing business in Europe where carriers were ordering fewer games as they changed the way they managed their businesses.

Analysts said the industry was suffering from growing pains. ISuppli suggests carriers are turning to the mobile video market instead, which it says holds the most upside potential of premium content categories.

Greg Ballard, Glu’s chief executive, visited us recently. He admitted the US was trailing Japan and Korea, where companies such as Namco and Sega were moving forward with multiplayer games on more sophisticated phones.

Glu was also still very dependent on carriers – 95 per cent of its games were delivered through 160 carriers. He expects downloads to shift more to the Web over the next three to five years, as well as to sideloading at retail through memory cards that handsets can now increasingly accommodate.

Glu sees itself as the most independent of the big three mobile game players in the West – Gameloft is backed by the video game publisher Ubisoft and Electronic Arts has bought Jamdat.

David Gosen, the head of mobile publisher I-play and another recent visitor, said Glu’s flotation on the Nasdaq in March has helped the profile of the industry. He believes more user-friendly handsets, all-you-can-eat data plans and big brands entering the sector will unlock the market in a big way over the next 12 to 18 months.

ISuppli’s forecasts back him up – it expects mobile gaming revenues to nearly triple by 2011, growing to $6.6bn, for a compound annual growth rate of 23 per cent.

That makes this year’s second-quarter slump seem like only a pause in a game, before the industry leaps to the next level.

There’s a lot of thinking outside the box going on in Silicon Valley on breaking out of its cubicle culture.

Intel, the epitome of corporate cubism, is reviewing its regimented floorplans and introducing more common spaces and a dash of colour.

"The whole nature of sitting down and hashing out ideas and collaborating is a bit stymied by the construct of the cubicles," Paul Otellini, chief executive, told us in August.

This month, Intel introduced Zero Email Friday, an attempt to break up the practice of engineers two cubicles apart sending an email to one another rather than getting up and having a conversation.

Google’s Lego play areas, oddly placed sculptures, kitchen garden and ideas boards suggest a cubicle cataclysm in Mountain View, but the G men and women would never get any work done if it were not for regular grey dividers giving them some private space.

That has not stopped the company organising a “cube decorating contest” on the theme of games, in order to carry on the creativity.

The winners were the Google Analytics team with a Jumanji theme, including a motion sensor that triggered a tiger’s roar when people walked by.

Credit also to Google developers for harking back to eight-bit games and Super Mario with their entry – working at the Googleplex is looking more like a fun factory for code plumbers every day.

Just when you thought the Web might be escaping the bounds of the browser with desktop widgets and other ex-browser applications, things start moving in the opposite direction.

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, Mike Volpi, chief executive of Joost, spoke about how the peer-to-peer video service was putting a lot of work into a version of Joost that would work inside a browser.

At the moment, Joost is a standalone application that users need to download and install - a fairly simple process, but one that is obviously being viewed as a barrier to adoption. Providing versions of the software for the different operating systems available can also be costly and time-consuming.

Earlier this week, Napster announced the 4.0 version of its music-download service would be based inside a browser, negating the need to download its separate application.

New plug-in technologies such as BitTorrent’s DNA, Microsoft’s Silverlight and the latest version of Adobe’s Flash are making the browser more versatile in coping with complex applications.

Even virtual worlds, which often need large stand-alone programs to be fully realised, are becoming more browser friendly.

At last week’s Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose, MovableLife came up with a browser-based viewer for Second Life and there was a big debate over the benefits of 2D browser-based worlds compared to their 3D standalone counterparts.

San Jose: The hottest discussion on the second and final day of the Virtual Worlds Conference here involved the founders of several virtual worlds debating where the platforms would go next.

The “Visionary Panel” comprised Raph Koster, president of Areae and founder of Metaplace.com, Hui Xu, founder of China’s HiPiHi and (left to right in the photo) Michael Wilson, chief executive of Makena Technologies (There.com), Stephen Lawler, general manager of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, Chris Klaus, founder of Kaneva and Corey Bridges, co-founder of the Multiverse Network.

Corey Bridges predicted web integration would be a near-term growth area for virtual worlds, including integration with existing social networks such as Facebook.

"[Social networking] will really propel virtual worlds into the mainstream, that’s going to be the killer app, it’s been video games driving it up to now," he said.

Michael Wilson disagreed: "We are looking at gaming, I don’t think virtual worlds are going to be that different from games," he said.

Microsoft’s Stephen Lawler demonstrated how Microsoft had added 3D to its maps.live.com’s photo representations of 150 cities, zooming in on San Jose. Wilson said he could imagine a TV news channel recreating a bank raid in San Jose using the technology, although bloggers would come up with their own different versions of what happened first.

"The web is going 3D," said Lawler, "It’s going to be a really exciting transition over the next decade."

Areae’s Koster disagreed violently: "3D is a red herring," he said."Shopping on Amazon in 3D will suck."

He argued we were heading for a "representation-agnostic" web, where information would be presented in a way that best suited the user’s needs and the device they were using - such as providing turn-by-turn driving directions in text on a mobile phone’s screen, rather than showing a 3D map. The most successful virtual worlds, such as Neopets and Club Penguin, were flat 2D experiences, he pointed out.

Lawler responded that retail experiences could be improved by 3D - such as grocery shopping down 3D aisles rather than having to choose from lists in the current web iteration.

"Interiors are best represented in 3D - there’s no 2D representation that could  capture this [conference] room [with its audience]."

2D was fine for views from a distance, such as a satellite map, but as you zoomed in to a building or a corridor, 3D was the better form, he said.

No one sent their avatars to the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose today – the event was an opportunity for real facetime between content creators, media companies, venture capitalists and analysts.

IBM and Linden Lab, the developer of Second Life, announced they would collaborate on developing universal avatars and interoperability between the growing number of virtual worlds.

Electric Sheep, the virtual world services company, unveiled its OnRez viewer – a browser-like program that simplifies the Second Life experience. It will be used by viewers of CBS’s CSI:NY TV series to pursue a mystery killer into the virtual world, in the latest crossover experiment by media companies with the metaverse.

The viewer is a tacit admission that Second Life is still too difficult to master for most people.

Michael Cai, director of broadband and gaming at the research firm Parks Associates, told me the audience is still relatively small for virtual worlds, compared to membership of social networks.

Less than 2 per cent of US internet users are daily visitors to such worlds while 45 to 50 per cent are active users of social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.

Yet virtual worlds seem natural extensions of social networks and inhabitiants of Kaneva and Gaia Online use social networking tools extensively in their worlds.

“Social networking sites are all about asynchronous communication with friends, while virtual worlds are all about real-time interaction,” says Giff Constable, head of software at Electric Sheep.

“Neither has been very good at the other’s mode of interaction so far, but there is no question that they will need to come together.”

Another price cut appears imminent for the PlayStation 3 and can’t come soon enough for Sony, given the latest news from its rivals Microsoft and Nintendo.

Industry executives believe Sony is about to announce a $399 version of the PS3 to coincide with the holiday season in the US. It currently offers an 80-gigabyte version for $599 and a  60Gb one for $499. There are reports that a 40Gb version will be offered in the UK for £299.

PS3 sales have lagged far behind those of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii and the gap could widen if Sony does not take action by cutting prices. Microsoft said yesterday that initial reports from retailers worldwide showed 360 sales, after the launch of its Halo 3 game on September 25, had nearly tripled compared to their weekly average.

Microsoft reported more than $300m in Halo sales worldwide in its first week. More than 2.7m gamers played it on its Xbox Live service in that period - nearly one-third of the worldwide membership of the online service.

Meanwhile, Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, has told the San Jose Mercury News that the company will not be able to keep up with demand for the Wii this Christmas.

"We’re working very hard to make sure that consumers are satisfied this holiday, but I can’t guarantee that we’re going to meet demand. As a matter of fact, I can tell you on the record we won’t," he said.