Google Unveils OpenSocial - The Blessings of Allies and Timing
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An open system like this is no good whatsoever if none of the companies in the social networking space want to use it. It’s a little bit like online social networking itself – it doesn’t matter how cool the network is and what it lets you do if nobody you know is using it. It’s worse if hardly anybody at all is using it, period.
Fortunately, despite all the feathers it’s ruffled, Google has almost as many friends as Tom from MySpace. No less than seventy companies are listed as having provided demos; they're participating as part of the alliance. Partners fall into two broad classes: social networks and developers of applications for social networks. Of course, there is a good bit of overlap in some sense; there’s nothing to prevent a social network from using OpenSocial to build its own applications.
There are some very prominent names on that list. Business networking site LinkedIn is rubbing shoulders with Oracle; Friendster and Orkut are socializing with iLike and Six Apart; Ning, Flixter, and even the New York Times are participating. But perhaps Google’s most notable friend is, yes, Tom himself: shortly after the search engine giant made the original announcement, MySpace came on board. As things stand now, the alliance boasts more than 100 million users; that’s more than twice the number of members signed up for Facebook.
Calling the timing of this alliance “interesting” is an understatement. The press release was issued a scant week or so after Microsoft revealed to the world that it had taken a minority stake in Facebook, with advertising rights as an important part of the deal. At the time, it was widely believed that the software giant had managed to steal a march on Google. Then, too, it was widely thought that MySpace was in the process of completing its own platform for applications; that platform will now be entirely focused on OpenSocial.
The timing of this alliance is good for other reasons too. Reporting on the story, TechCrunch noted that “Developers have been complaining nonstop about the costs of learning yet another markup language for every new social network platform, and taking developer time in creating and maintaining the code…Developers will immediately start building on these APIs to get distribution across the impressive lists of hosts…” If developers built more than 5,000 applications in the hopes of reaching 48 million Facebook users, how much busier do you suppose they’ll get on the hope of reaching more than twice that many?
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