Research Roundup: Google’s OpenSocial
Last week, much of the Internet world was anxiously awaiting the answer to who would win the chance to invest in Facebook. Microsoft “won” the opportunity to invest $240 million in the social networking company, snubbing Google.
It didn’t take long for Google to respond. Yesterday, Google announced OpenSocial, a development platform that would be supported by a consortium of social networking and technology companies including MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, Bebo, Salesforce.com, Oracle, Hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Google’s own Orkut.
OpenSocial will consist of a series of common API’s (application programming interfaces) built on top of the existing Google Gadget platform. They will enable developers to build a single application which may run on multiple platforms of the participating software providers.
Here’s a quick roundup of the initial feedback:
The New York Times says “the alliance now presents a powerful counterweight to Facebook, which, after opening up its site to developers last spring, has persuaded thousands of them to create programs for its users. The addition of MySpace, the world’s largest social network with 110 million active members, and Bebo, the No. 1 site in Britain with 39 million active users, could also put pressure on Facebook to drop its own standard and join the alliance, called OpenSocial.”
The FT adds that “the move pointed to an acceleration of the realignment that had already been under way among some of the internet’s biggest powers as social networking has risen in importance, according to observers.”
The Economist questions whether this may spell the end of the fast ride for Facebook:
Could Facebook, a three-year-old social network and the hottest internet company of the year, soon be as passé as AOL? AOL, you will recall, was a popular but proprietary online service of the early 1990s. But then Netscape’s browser made the web easily and widely available, and today AOL is a lumbering unit of a media conglomerate. Another such “Netscape moment” may just have occurred in online social networks.
TechCrunch suggests that “Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle.”
Meanwhile tech entrepreneur and blogger Dave Winer responds that
Google has a long way to go to build the base of users and developers connected using the new protocol that is the subject of all this chest-thumping. Do they exist in any tangible form? How much of a moving target are they? It’s like proclaiming the new owners of A-Rod’s contract as the winners of the 2008 World Series.
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