OpenSocial Takes on China

Google has announced that seven new social networks in China have been added to the OpenSocial standard: 51.com, 51wan.com, Douban.com, Hainei.com, Tianji.com, Xiaonei.com and YiQi.com. These are all large social networks, one of which, Xiaonei.com, appears to be a direct rip off of Facebook. The company also recently raised $430 million making it better funded then Facebook itself.

I would imagine that any hopes of Facebook joining the OpenSocial movement have been eliminated for the time being with Xiaonei being announced as one of the large partners. As OpenSocial continues to expand its reach, the battle between the Facebook platform and OpenSocial continues. While most developers building on Facebook have been focused on the impending platform changes, OpenSocial developers have been hard at work trying to extend their reach with the launch of each new supporting platform.

OpenSocial has been extremely successful with gaining momentum recently announcing that MyAOL would be supporting OpenSocial and that more AOL products will also support the standard in the near future. If there is a lesson to be learned here, I’d say that Facebook needs to have a platform evangelist that also goes and pitches their platform to other sites. They are ultimately losing the battle to OpenSocial when it comes to platform adoption.

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