Read more after the jump.

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This is a guest blog post

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.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

What’s Being Offered?

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:

• Yahoo! Social Platform – “The Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP) consists of a suite of REST-based social APIs from Yahoo! including: Profiles, Connections, Updates, Contacts and Status.” Sound familiar? It should. The service enables users to develop a new form of social application similar to Facebook applications or MySpace applications. From a technical standpoint the applications are much more similar to MySpace applications because they take advantage of OAuth and REST. They’ve also announced a PHP SDK that developers can use to start programming today.
• Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) – Remember FQL? If you don’t, it’s the language that developers can use to send SQL-like queries to Facebook instead of making standard API calls to retrieve user information. Yahoo! is releasing a very similar service but they are calling it the “command line version of Pipes.” Whatever they are calling it, this sounds to me a lot like FQL.
• Yahoo! Application Platform – Wait didn’t we just go over the Social Platform? Yes we did! The main purpose of the Application Platform in contrast to the Social Platform is that it provides a centralized distribution point for applications to Yahoo! users. Back in September I wrote that platforms are the new software distributors and this further supports my assertion. Applications will have canvas pages, landing pages, invitations, notifications, a chrome, updates, and a few other features.

Yahoo! Social Platform is an “Open” Facebook Connect Competitor

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.

What Does This Mean for Businesses?

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:

• How large is your company? – If you are a large company, you should be able to come up with the funding to have a Facebook application, iPhone application, Android Application, MySpace application, Yahoo! application, and any other large platform application. Small businesses obviously can’t do that and that’s why they need to consider other factors.
• Who’s your target market? – In the U.S., the majority of Facebook users are still 18-25. That demographic begins to skew somewhat when you start looking at the other platforms. Considering the demographic biases of each platform is important.
• Ease of development – It’s easier to develop a Facebook application than an iPhone application. If you happen to have iPhone developers on staff though, it’s obviously a better decision to build on that platform. For those without resources, it’s clear that easier platforms will make it possible to make an application for less money.
• Other Options – Sometimes you may not have the budget at all and instead it would be best to figure out how to leverage the social features of these platforms at minimal cost. One option would be to integrate social features into your company’s website. For those with less resources it may be useful to examine all the other options out there.

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

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

To me, Facebook’s release of their open-source platform is also an acknowledgment that the world does not just exist in blue and white (Facebook’s colors). So if Facebook knows that there is a world beyond their borders, why don’t they just support the OpenSocial initiative? Facebook claims that it’s because of privacy reasons but there has to be something beyond privacy that is really a concern for them.

Mike Arrington seems to think that it is a last ditch effort by Facebook to become the defacto standard of the social web. Unfortunately for Facebook I think it is a losing battle. At this point I’d say that the majority of users have picked their social network of choice and will use one site most often. Additionally, Facebook selected a somewhat restrictive license as Matt Asay points out.

As I wrote this morning though, all of this is ultimately a stupid, drawn-out game of chess (or poker). I wrote, “The reality is that Facebook will find that no matter how much money they have in the bank, there is no way that they can innovate faster than the overall market.” Facebook shouldn’t try to out smart Google and others by participating in their game.

Instead Facebook should simply open up and move on to the real issue at hand: figuring out a way to make money on social networks. After all is said and done we’ll all be singing O.A.R.’s “That Was a Crazy Game of Poker.”

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While Patrick couldn’t speak about Google’s intention in providing monetization opportunities for OpenSocial applications, it is expected that Google will provide their own monetization solutions for OpenSocial apps. During our conversation Patrick discusses the benefits of Google Friend Connect and OpenSocial and addresses some criticism which has arisen over the new standard.

If you want to learn more about the OpenSocial program and where it is headed listen to our podcast. Also here is one of Patrick’s recent presentations on OpenSocial and Google’s various APIs.

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The canvas feature is a drastic change for start pages overall as widgets have become the standard. For me this means that we are witnessing the convergence of social applications as widgets. Once two distinct entities, widgets and social applications had separate roles. Now, widgets and social applications are rapidly becoming more ubiquitous and distribution channels are becoming more streamlined.

This means that developers can now reach more people with less effort. The only problem remaining is that lack of viral channels on iGoogle. A while back I contacted Tariq Krim, CEO of Netvibes, to suggest that they add social features to their startpage. At the time he didn’t understand my suggestion (could have been lost in translation) but in a matter of months, Netvibes enabled the sharing of startpage widgets across their platform.

Erick Schonfeld suggests that iGoogle may slowly become its own social network. That’s due to today’s addition of friend updates to the iGoogle homepage. The web is rapidly becoming more social and while all of these standards and features are a complete mess, soon enough much of this will hopefully become more straightforward and slowly we will see the centralization of social identity management on the web. For now, developers have another platform to play with. Check out the video below to learn more.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Who wasn’t present on the phone call? Facebook and Microsoft. These are the two remaining companies that have not joined OpenSocial. They are still holding out an ultimately are trying to battle the underdog who has gained significant momentum: OpenSocial. It’s hard to call any standard promoted by Google an “underdog” but technically there are less application install on their platform but more potential users.

So this leads me to question where all of this is going. One conclusion that I have is that these standards are much larger than the initial group of developers that were successful on Facebook. While we still see some of the leaders making a presence on MySpace, there a number of new players but strangely enough most of them are still the traditional players on the social web.

Conversely, much of what we are seeing is a battle taking place, much of which is being done through press releases and some of which is being done by developers. The social web is also getting a whole lot more complex. As Scot Kveton from the OpenID foundation said, “I think this is great – they are doing all o fthe right things with the non-assertion covenant but its another foundation. Its more work for companies to join, etc. So now you have openid, opensocial, oauth is going to have to do something, microformats, etc – this gets pretty complicated IMHO.”

Ultimately what we would like is for things to become a lot more simple but in the short-run it appears as though things will have to get a lot more complex before it gets easy. This is great for those helping companies navigate the social web though. There will be a lot more business headed towards consultants in this space over the coming months.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

My biggest problem with the standard so far has been that it’s not easy! There are multiple standards that must be supported to launch your application on MySpace and other social networks so far. It appears that this new foundation will focus on bringing together the community to help further the OpenSocial standard. A statement from Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management, said “The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open.”

The new foundation has the support of both Yahoo, Google and MySpace. This comes on the heels of the data portability news from Microsoft earlier this morning. Looks like the Google P.R. engine is in full swing. While I’m not sure about the significance of this news as it pertains to the future of the social web, this new foundation is paving the way for OpenSocial to become the social web standard as opposed to the licensing of the Facebook platform to other websites.

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