So unless you were hiding under a rock last week, you would've noticed that Google announced the launch of their "Open Social" platform, creating an open standard for creating applications that run on any social networking system that implements Open Social. Several high-profile social networking companies were mentioned as partners in the announcement, including Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, iLike, Flixster, RockYou, and Slide.What does this mean for application developers?
Well, this is great news, first of all. The movement towards an open standards-based API for application development will help alleviate the concerns many developers had about Facebook and it's walled-garden approach to application development. This also expands the market for all application developers, as one application can be developed for a plethora of "container" social networking sites.
The floodgates that Facebook opened with the launch of their Developer's API have now been smashed open, expanding the application development market a great deal.
What does this mean for Facebook?
This is both good and bad for Facebook. Bad, of course, since their control over the reigns of application development are being loosened (somewhat). They still have a stranglehold on the market, but a viable alternative has now been created, backed by a solid company (Google) with an open standards-based approach that developers crave.
On the other hand, this still may be good news for Facebook. The Application Development scene has been blown wide open. If there wasn't already enough incentive for developers to start looking into social networking application development, this announcement just blew the doors wide open. The pie is only growing bigger, and Facebook stands to profit immensely.
Where have MySpace and Yahoo been lately?
Um, yeah... good question.
4 comments:
Mark Cuban offers some great insight on Facebook and OpenSocial on his blog.
I agree with all your points. You mention Google being a solid company, and I'm just going to further that notion.
Google has put a serious amount of money into this, and if you check out the OpenSocial release page, you'll see they've spent time recruiting the top Facebook application developers to work for their new structure as well.
Also, Orkut, Google's version of Facebook, already has millions of users, most from Brazil and Japan.
These guys may be on their way to making the first global social network. Facebook might have to plug in and will play the role of "America's social network" in the global Google OpenSocial network.
Just as Instant Messaging clients are localized, it seems like the social networking wars are quite geographical as well. MySpace still dominates the US, but Facebook is catching up. However, Facebook is running away with things in Canada. And then in Europe they have Bebo and the likes which have a strong hold on users. It's interesting to see how they evolve (or devolve, with the likes of Friendster).
It's still "open" at the application level as opposed to the data level. Your application can do the same thing for 10 different OpenSocial-supporting sites and it will work, but you can't access data from a number of different networks simultaneously to serve a page to one of them (or external to an social network).
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/11/opensocial_social_mashups.html
Most of the cooler stuff that Cuban is talking about depends on this kind of data-providing service.
It obviously makes a whole lot of sense that they want to keep things this way - they want to stay in control of the page views - but it isn't in the user's best interest, so it's a point of weakness in their strategy.
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