It’s going to be very interesting to see how the social networking space evolves in 2008.
One of the critical advancements will be the launch of Google’s Open Social platform–a product intended to minimize the need for storing, and restoring, all one’s social networking information (friends, etc) in a myriad of destinations like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo.
Google clearly appears to have Facebook in its scope on this one and today Facebook initiated, what will likely be one of many counters. They are effectively going to allow the Facebook Platform to be made available to other social networking sites which may be interested in the Facebook Apps and looking to license the Platform architecture. Paid Content posted on this subject today:
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-bebo-unveils-facebook-compatible-open-application-platform/
To me, something like Google Open Social makes more sense–it’s a third party effectively that won’t feel as threatening to a MySpace, Bebo or LinkedIn as an arch competitor like Facebook will. That said, I’ve been continually off in my predictions about social networks over the past four years so my predictions here may be equally flawed.
3 Comments
December 16, 2007 at 7:56 pm
I think they announced OpenSocial a lot sooner than they wanted because of Microsoft’s popfly (http://www.popfly.ms/). I think Popfly is even a more complete idea than OpenSocial.
December 16, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Thanks, Steven. This does look interesting at first glance. I figured it was a matter of time before MS would do something like this. Have they been publicizing Popfly at all? I haven’t seen anything about it yet.
December 18, 2007 at 10:15 pm
I heard about it from folks at work. I think they released it at some tech conference and haven’t really done advertising for it.