Google OpenSocial: It's no Facebook killer
Posted
Oct 31 2007, 12:53 AM
by
Kim Peterson
There have been rumors far and wide that Google is working on its own social network. Turns out the company is working on something better, though it's no threat to social networking darling Facebook.
OpenSocial, which Google will introduce this week, lets programmers make applications for many different social networking sites at once. Doesn't sound like a big deal. But first you have to understand that part of Facebook's appeal are the 5,000 programs people have built for the site. You can compare movie tastes with other users, share music, ask questions and pick your top friends. Those programs -- as silly as some of them are -- keep users on Facebook and keep the ad revenue flowing. They're a big reason why Facebook is raking in the cash from Microsoft and others right now.
Developers are busy creating programs for Facebook and ignoring all the other social networking sites out there, including Google's own Orkut, a network popular in Brazil but not in the U.S. So Google bands together with other social networks and figures out a way that developers can write programs for all of them at once.
In other words, someone can come up with one program that works on Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, hi5, Plaxo and Ning. This doesn't mean anyone's going to stop writing for Facebook, but maybe they'll consider building programs for OpenSocial as well.
A couple of thoughts come to mind on this:
1. MySpace is conspicuously absent from OpenSocial. Google has a $900 million deal to sell ads on MySpace, which is still the king of social networking sites. Will MySpace eventually join OpenSocial?
2. Will developers get paid well on OpenSocial? Facebook lets them keep all the ad revenue their programs generate. Will Google and the other networks match those terms?
Business 2.0 has a good article here on how some developers are hitting Facebook gold.
