Posts Tagged ‘OpenSocial’

There has been little discussion surrounding yesterday’s Facebook announcement of fbOpen, the open-source version of the Facebook platform. Many have speculated about the intention of fbOpen and have boiled it down to a response to Google’s OpenSocial initiative. It is difficult to predict what will happen now that the platform has been open-sourced but it appears that Facebook has moved beyond licensing the platform and is instead making it a free-for-all so that developers can have their application run on other websites.

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.”

Last week I spoke with Patrick Chanezon, evangelist for OpenSocial at Google. He speaks frequently at events around the country to educate people about how to take advantage of OpenSocial and a few of Google’s other products. I spoke with Patrick about the recent rifts between Facebook and Google, the future of monetizing OpenSocial applications and a number of other things.

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.

OpenSocial developers have just gained access to a whole new platform: iGoogle. iGoogle is the startpage for millions of users across the web. While it isn’t as robust as Facebook, the ability to distribute your application through more channels is always a good thing. The applications also include a canvas view that provides more space for applications in contrast to the standard widget-sized currently provided.

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.

This morning I wrote about the new OpenSocial foundation. Unfortunately I missed out on the press call but there were definitely some key takeaways. Marshall Kirkpatrick provides a great writeup of the call. Two significant statements made was that Orkut will go live next week and that 200 million users will be reached by all the applications.

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.

Caroline McCarthy has posted the details of a new foundation that has been set up to “support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year as a way to promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites.” The purpose of the new organization is to spread the concept that OpenSocial is not being managed by Google but is instead being supported by the community.

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.

Yesterday, Google announced that OpenSocial has been delayed yet again. Rather than launching the Orkut platform immediately, they have decided to enter a testing phase during which time they will begin whitelisting applications to be placed in the Orkut directory. After the pre-launch which will be a four week period, OpenSocial and the Orkut platform will finally go live.

For those that were expecting Orkut to go live next week, you will be disappointed. There is no word on whether or not this will also delay the launch of the MySpace platform which is also supposed to launch next week. The launch of Orkut and MySpace will launch the beginning of the platform wars during which time we will see if Facebook can maintain its dominant position or if the larger MySpace user base will prove to be a tough competitor.

Ultimately, the future of transportable identities will be partially dependent on the success of competing social platforms. If the other social platforms fail to attract massive user installations, we will see a decrease in the hype surrounding social applications. The most likely scenario involves slower yet steady growth on competing platforms due to spam filters already in place at launch time. This is not a bad situation, it just means that the social platforms will take a longer time to see widespread adoption.