Social Networking (Continued)
November 2nd, 2007 . by Coffee MasterMy roommate just informed me about Google moving into social networking. I wrote a post about what I had heard yesterday, but today is a new day, right?
Here is a snipet from the article above:
Simply put, Google has created a distributed social network framework that will end up competing with Facebook and MySpace (and Bebo in markets like the UK). It is kind of a ‘third place’ of social networks - and it is a huge boost to the less populous or more specialized social networks such as Ning, Hi5 and our old friend Friendster.
It’s not entirely clear yet what the benefits will be to users. I assume there will be some interoperability - e.g. when a user joins up to a Ning social network, there may be hooks into their Friendster profile and data. Will this be the full ‘export’ functionality that industry people like Marc Canter
have been crying out for? It remains to be seen. I think it’s fair to assume there won’t be an export function from OpenSocial to Facebook or MySpace, at this point anyway. I’d love to be proven wrong though.
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This is the beginning of opening up the walled gardens of current social networks, but the biggest player, myspace, is joining in on the Open Social fun. I am curious to see what kind of apps come out of this move, and how they will benefit the end user. After facebook opened up their api to developers, I saw lots of crazy apps that could be fun, but were mostly pointless (vampire, super wall, too many to list). Just as email has become ubiquitous because of its (mostly) open standards nature, social networks may turn into more useful tools, and less teenage time wasters.
Another article by Tech Crunch enumerates the benefits to developers by having an open system with a standard framework to build their applications on.
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