At least, according to Vancouver-based project founder and core architect Rastin Mehr.

Mehr’s open-source framework for making everything social won a spot in the current Mozilla WebFWD accelerator cohort, which the organization best known for the Firefox browser created to help open-source organizations build successful companies.

It’s like an MBA program for a startup, says Mehr.

“Anahita is a social networking platform framework that we’ve been building for the last four years,” Mehr told me yesterday. “We think in the future a lot of the web services are going to run on some kind of social networking structure as an underlying layer.”

That sounds a lot like Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of building a social layer for the Internet. And the world’s biggest social network has made a lot of that vision reality by becoming the first social network with one billion users.

How can Anahita compete? Primarily by not competing.

“Mark Zuckerberg has done it but it’s not an internet social layer, it’s a Facebook social layer,” Mehr says. “What Anahita provides is a platform for building social apps. We have all the tools we need to build and validate apps faster than anyone else.”

Anahita focuses on helping developers make their internal and external applications for web, enterprise, and startups social. Not by copying App.net, which is primarily the plumbing to which you can attach a social frontend, and not by layering in social on top of an existing framework, like a Gigya gamification solution or a Janrain social login integration … but by building an app from the ground up within a social ecosystem.

“You can’t add social things, you have to build on top of social,” says Mehr. “We provide all the generic building blocks … for a network of salespeople, or the location of products, or which people have been working on those products, or anything.”

That’s because at its core, Anahita consists of three objects out of which developers can build the entire universe of their application: Nodes, Graphs, and Stories. An Actor node, for instance, has an identity, a story to tell, a graph of apps that it can use, and a social graph of people to which it is connected.

Source: John Koetsier

Cofounder Ash Sanieyan.

“Once you define these, you can build a person, build a group, build a spaceship, or build a Cylon,” Mehr says with a smile. “These are all actors … what you see as a profile on a social media site is essentially an actor.”

The framework is LAMP technology, built in PHP and intended to be released on Linux. With it, clients and users have built online learning portals, websites, Internal social networks, social e-commerce experiences, online magazines, and niche social networks.

But building a business with the open source software is another matter. That’s where WebFWD comes in.

“You always have holes, weaknesses … but when you go thru WebFWD, they help you patch all these missing elements,” Mehr told me. “You learn what path to go to find a business model.”

Anahita has had a freemium model, allowing developers to download the software for free, but charging for premium support via annual subscriptions. The challenge that Mehr and cofounder Ash Sanieyan faced, however, was focusing an infrastructure that can literally be used to build almost anything to a finer point that business partners, users, and investors could grasp.

Again, WebFWD helped.

“They work with you on how to pitch … they bring public speakers and pitching coaches, and on the very first day we had to pitch 4 times to four different audiences,” Mehr said. “And they rip you apart in public, so you develop a very thick skin by the time you come out.”

The ripping and the thick skin have come in handy. Since joining WebFWD, Mehr and Sanieyan have pitched four VCs, built their network of contacts in the Valley, and become much better prepared to meet potential investors.

Although WebFWD is an accelerator, it doesn’t provide capital and doesn’t take equity. Instead, it operates simply to give back to the community by helping open-source innovators build successful companies while staying true to open-source ideals. Anahita’s goal is to build that kind of successful company by becoming the go-to infrastructure for anyone to build online social software — just as Linux has become the go-to infrastructure on which to build server platforms, Mac OS X, Android, and more.

I asked Mehr if WebFWD had paid the team’s expenses to make the trip down to San Francisco.

“No,” he said. “But they give you a lot of free food.”

photo credit: tobimcfly via photopin

Facebook shared a few of those details today.

Mozilla’s goal was to build a Social API that would integrate content from any social network directly to your browser, even when you’re not on the actual social network’s website, Facebook engineer Pamel Vagata said in a post.

Facebook’s implementation keep you connected with your Facebook friends while you surf the wider web.

Facebook Messenger for Firefox is the first Facebook product to use a key new feature of HMTL, WebSockets, at scale. WebSockets enable persistent connections between your web browser and a webserver in a manner that scales well and also uses few resources. Facebook rolled out WebSockets on its existing chat servers but also had to reengineer its front-end Messenger code to eliminate dependencies on code fragments that simple are not available in the browser implementation.

Facebook credits its organizational structure — small groups, independent engineers — with the capability to make the changes quickly.

“Our ability to work with a small team and push code on a daily basis meant we could rapidly iterate on the API design and feature work to get this integration into the wild,” Vagata said.

Facebook is the first major social network to make use of this API, but theoretically, any such site could make use of it. Just a few days ago, Mozilla released a demo of Social API with WebRTC that shows off even more advanced functionality, such as chatting, video chatting and file sharing.

Here’s Mozilla’s overview of its Social API with WebRTC:

photo credit: Βethan via photopin cc

But not according to the European Union. And, not according to Mozilla or Google.

At issue, according to an article posted by ComputerWorld, is secret APIs.

APIs, or application programming interfaces, are used by applications to plug in functionalities on a computing device or service. In an operating system, that might mean access to the file system, graphical outputs to a screen, or the ability to create and manage windows in an application.

Secret APIs are APIs that the owner of a system creates but does not share with partners or developers, giving the ecosystem creator potential advantages in application development. That’s exactly what Microsoft stands accused of doing.

“Internet Explorer 10 on Metro has special access to some very powerful APIs from over in Win32 land,” Asa Dotzler, a Mozilla spokesperson, writes in a personal blog post. Those APIs enable Microsoft’s browser to run quickly and efficiently on Javascript-intensive websites.

Unfortunately, however, non-Microsoft browsers on ARM processors are not getting the same treatment, Dotzler alleges. “Microsoft is giving its own Internet Explorer special privileges that no other Metro app, including other Metro browsers, are allowed.”

The upshot, according to Dotzler:

If we built Firefox for Windows ARM Metro, we would not have access to those powerful Win32 APIs and so we would be at an extreme disadvantage when compared to IE 10 for Metro. We could build a beautiful Firefox that looked really nice on Metro, but Firefox would be so crippled in terms of power and speed that it’s probably not worth it to even bother. No sane user would want to surf today’s web and use today’s modern websites with that kind of crippled browser.

Google will, of course, have similar concerns with its Chrome browser.

The EU will be investigating this claim, according to Reuters, and will be adding this new claim to the already-announced investigation into Microsoft’s alleged failure to provide a browser choice screen in a Windows 7 service page issued in 2011.

Image credit: Bjorn Hogland/ShutterStock