MySpace is revamping their homepage, starting with an optional preview today to see how their users respond. The new look comes with two column streams displaying an activity stream and a content discovery area that gives a much cleaner look desperately needed by MySpace. The homepage will be formally launched on August 19th and marks the first of many UX changes to come.
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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
This is a guest blog post Brian Balfour, Co-Founder and VP BD and Marketing, of Viximo who helps social applications and games get distribution on social networks beyond Facebook. Part 1 and 2 of this series can be found here and here.
Immediately after Facebook announced its open developer platform in 2007, Google quickly launched Open Social, its initiative to create a common standard for social sites across the web. Its purpose was to enable developers to create and distribute applications easily – write once, deploy everywhere. Social networks around the world quickly joined the “OS Alliance” and a PR frenzy followed, suggesting that the “entire social networking world” was backing Google as they were ganging up to take on Facebook.
Mixi, the prominent social network in Japan, launches its OpenSocial support in beta today. This is the first major move Mixi has taken towards supporting an open platform approach. Choosing to take these initial steps by supporting OpenSocial means that Mixi is looking to become a part of a rather large community of social networking sites around the world.
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Earlier this week I had the opportunity to speak with Kevin Marks of Google about the current state of Friend Connect, OpenSocial, and the future of the social web. Friend Connect was initially seen as one of the methods for “out opening Facebook”. In other words Google was concerned about Facebook’s growing ownership of users’ identities on the web. While the initial steps were made for competitive purposes, OpenSocial has become part of a greater movement to simplify the models for sharing our social data around the web.
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A few months back, Yahoo! announced that it would be opening up the site’s services to developers in a significant way. This afternoon the company rolled out a big iteration which has a massive social component. The service has a bunch of features that developers can use to detect any individual web user’s “social presence”. So what are the new component of this open platform and what does it mean for developers?
First, let’s take a look at what exactly Yahoo! is offering as part of the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) 1.0 platform launch:
Facebook Connect appears to have the best odds of succeeding so far as they have had the most partners roll out sites for any company that we’ve seen so far. Honestly at this point much of the “success” will be determined by a PR battle since none of the technology has been rolled out except for Yahoo! which has now released what appears to be a terrific platform.
It’s clear that many of the features of the Yahoo! Social and Application platforms take cues from Facebook aside from the user interface which for now appears to be completely non-existent outside of the Yahoo! chrome. Just the other day I posted about John McCrea’s lessons from attending the User Experience Summit, which was make things look good (as well as a few other key components 
).
Yahoo! has a solid chance at boosting their developers to the forefront with critical integration points which could in the future include a link to applications directly on the Yahoo! homepage, something any developer would die for. With so much potential, social application developers are now going to be pushed to their limits.
One additional interesting factoid about Yahoo’s new platforms is that they will be leveraging OAuth and OpenSocial, each open standards for the social web. At this point, Facebook is standing alone and while they still have substantial leverage, if Yahoo! can pull all the right strings, Facebook may be forced to comply. As the Facebook platform becomes more limiting, and social application developers are stretched thin, they are rapidly searching new opportunities for growth.
The Yahoo! platforms could very well be that next place they are looking for.
Your in the midst of planning the social media strategy for your company and you just learned about Yahoo!’s new Open Strategy platform. While you may not understand everything that it offers, it sounds a lot like Facebook Connect and now you are forced to take this into consideration when suggesting something to the boss. Or perhaps you are the boss but being an intelligent individual that takes all options into account, you are now considering Yahoo! as a distribution channel for your brand.
Well, the reality is that all of the things need to be taken into consideration. I wish I could say it’s more easy than that. The primary factors driving this decision should be:
It’s clear that the trend is toward an open web and any company standing in the way of that is not likely to survive in the long-run. Whatever your company decides to do, Yahoo! has just made your decisions just a little more complex.
Yahoo! Application Canvas Screenshot
Yahoo! Application Invite Screenshot
Ning.com, a web tool/application/service which allows you to create your own social network has been around for quite some time now. Despite the lack of publicity and hype and too much media coverage, Ning managed to sustain itself and has gradually build-up a large userbase. Well, what can you expect from a web service such as Ning which practically makes each and everyone of us a programmer if we are to build our own social network. If this would not convince you to use Ning and create your social network, what if we tell you that Ning has joined the OpenSocial movement and has opened up its platform to the wild. Read more
Today the OpenSocial participants jointly announced the launch of the OpenSocial Foundation. The organization’s purpose it to keep OpenSocial as a separate entity which is independent of ownership by any individual group. The current participants are hi5, Google, Flixster, MySpace and Yahoo! Today’s announced came with the launch of the OpenSocial Foundation website which appears to be simply a source of information.
Just yesterday we announced that hi5 had launched OpenSocial version 0.8 which includes a set of REST APIs. One commenter posted that they had tried out the new version of OpenSocial on hi5 and had substantial technical issues. I also highlighted that OpenSocial still has some catching up to do to compete with Facebook as their platform has become the top choice for developers on the social web.
MySpace is currently catching up to Facebook making them the leading implementer of OpenSocial. OpenSocial has high hopes and according to many developers that have build on top of the standard, it has made it much easier for them to port their applications across platforms. What used to be a “coalition of the willing” has rapidly become a tightly knit group of social web leaders.
For more information check out the OpenSocial Foundation site. The site includes a FAQ, the organization’s Bylaws and a number of other resources. Also be sure to check out the MySpace developer post regarding this announcement.
Today hi5 announced the release of the OpenSocial 0.8 standard which has been in beta for the past few weeks. According to the release, over 1,800 applications have been installed on the platform to date. The most significant change here? The launch of a RESTful API which enables developers to choose their development language rather than being forced into Javascript. This is a huge upgrade for the OpenSocial standard.
Is this a big announcement for OpenSocial? Not necessarily in terms of the standard’s reach but it definitely does imply substantial upgrades from a development perspective. As OpenSocial improves, the standard continues to face challenges in terms of adoption by developers. While the applications on MySpace, hi5 and other platforms appear to be growing rapidly, Facebook continues to dwarf the competition.
While that may not be the case indefinitely, it appears that developers have been pushed to their limits. Take the MySpace Data Availability initiative for instance. It is essentially a copycat of Facebook Connect but was first to launch and while it may be confusing, is supposedly completely functional. So far there has been no word of any large applications that have been launched with the service.
It’s not completely clear why this is the case but it appears that there is much more anticipation surrounding Facebook Connect. The announcement of this new version of OpenSocial may perhaps attract the same sort of response: a congratulatory pat on the back without comparable developer adoption. I could easily be wrong though.
Ali Partovi of iLike for instance has an enthusiastic comment in the press release, “I’m delighted that hi5 is the first Open Social container to release the 0.8 upgrade.” One can only be so excited about a new version of OpenSocial being released though. I think we’re all still waiting on version 1.0 to arrive. Hopefully my negative tone is not taken whole-heartedly.
I believe that this is a significant step for OpenSocial and for hi5. It will be interesting to see how the battle between OpenSocial and the Facebook platform plays out over the coming months.
When OpenSocial was announced last year by Google, it was paraded around as the system which was going to force Facebook to open up. While Google wasn’t necessarily putting those words in their press releases, insiders suggested that this was the goal. At first I called OpenSocial a “coalition of the willing” but ultimately there was a good shot at the standard gaining mass appeal. The company has now attracted MySpace, hi5, orkut and Friendster to join and as I previously thought, Bebo was part of it (Erick Schonfeld seems to think they aren’t yet part).
Whatever the case, it’s clear that the competing platforms to Facebook still haven’t attracted the same number of developers and haven’t experience the same blockbuster growth that Facebook continues to post. Facebook has around 37,000 applications and continues to grow rapidly. How many applications does OpenSocial have across all of their social networks? Only 4,500. That’s less than 15 percent the size of Facebook.
OpenSocial makes a lot of sense though and based on numbers that Techcrunch was provided, OpenSocial may be prepared to double in size before the end of September. One interesting that I found interesting was the chart that Erick Schonfeld included in hist post about OpenSocial growth (pictured below). There isn’t exactly the hockey stick growth that one would hope for. Instead, the only growth that is being provided is by expanding onto new networks.
Contrast that with Facebook where they maintain one platform yet continue to post continuous growth. I’ll be interested to see if OpenSocial can find their way on to networks that are posting spectacular growth. One company not included in the chart is imeem, who continues to post growth but did not launch with “Google’s approval”. I’m not sure why that’s required to be included in the chart but somebody definitely thought imeem wasn’t important enough to display!
It will be interesting to see if OpenSocial can eventually become the defacto standard for social applications.
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.
