(2 votes, average: 9.5 out of 10)
Loading ...Google’s Open Face Off with Facebook
By Joaquim P. Menezes
The blogsphere is abuzz today with news – and a ton of speculation – about OpenSocial, Google’s new social networking project set to go live Thursday.
OpenSocial is being dubbed Google’s retort to Facebook, the hugely popular social networking site founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg.
And yet OpenSocial isn’t a social networking site.
It’s a set of common APIs that software developers can use to write programs for several social networking sites – Google’s own Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Xing.
So the value proposition – from the developer’s perspective – is the ability to write an application once, and have it used across multiple Web 2.0 sites.
Developers would also be able to use common HTML, Javascript and Flash - instead of the proprietary markup language they are compelled to use when writing apps for Facebook.
Whether, and how much, developers would gain financially from OpenSocial would depend on terms offered to them by Google and its partners. (Facebook so far has been pretty generous, allowing developers to keep all the ad revenue they generate on the site).
Interestingly, high-profile developers testing the OpenSocial service, include companies that created popular Facebook apps, including the one on iLike that allows users to play music clips, show concerts they are going to, and participate in a music trivia quiz.
iLike CEO Ali Patrovi aptly summarized the key value prop of OpenSocial’s “write once, use multiple times” capability for developers: “The benefit OpenSocial offers us,” he said, “is we can … syndicate what we do to other social networks.”
So how will OpenSocial’s launch impact Facebook’s fortunes? – that’s the million-dollar question (or the $15 billion dollar question, as that’s what Facebook was valued at when Microsoft recently bought a 1.6 per cent stake in the company)
The answer would depend on a couple of factors:
- Whether key developers will abandon Facebook, focusing instead on writing apps for the OpenSocial “platform” – apps that could potentially be syndicated to multiple sites
- Whether the OpenSocial model will erode Facebook’s 52.2 million user base
I believe both the above contingencies are highly unlikely.
Facebook today is among the top social networking sites (second only to MySpace, which had 114.1 million unique visitors in June).
Facebook’s massive user community represents explosive revenue generation potential for developers – something they aren’t likely to abandon.
As far as users go, methinks the chief reason they visit Facebook is to interact with friends and associates, who are also on Facebook – not to invite others to become zombies, werewolves, pirates and vampires, or view shoddy digital aquariums.
So Facebook fiends aren’t very likely to abandon the site for Orkut, Xing, Friendster or Newsgator because the latter have some cool apps that boost their appeal a few notches.
November 2nd, 2007 at 2:18 pm
If I owned facebook I would solicit Bill’s staff to help come up with alternatives to requiring developers to use their proprietary markup language.
This way all they have to do is introduce these open alternatives at the right time. Kind of like knowing when to castle in chess.
July 9th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
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