The OpenSocial site went live on Thursday and I’m sure will ……

Don Dodge opines 50M Facebook users don’t care about OpenSocial APIs and tries to convince us that Facebook is not dead. Granted that Microsoft just spent $250M on Facebook so it must hurt to see all ……

Myspace sucks and is one of the worst platforms out there. Go look at their pages, nothing but a bunch of lonely women and petafiles.

Facebook is top-notch and MS as a big win here. Google can try to get the other social networks but they are all only second best.

Facebook does not have a working and proven ad-network.
After all, eyeballs is less than half of the equation.
Is it that easy to build a network to rival Google’s?

Not that I wish the Juggernaut any more power than it already has, but the leverage of their ad-network-muscle does seem a compelling advantage.

The industry has been all abuzz over Open Social. EVERYONE seems to be viewing this as a showdown between Google–Friends and Facebook (and Microsoft). It isn’t! Facebook is a network of users. People are on Facebook because their friends are…

Thanks for the coverage on this. There’s been a lot of speculation and geek speak, but I’ve tried another angle: Explaining it to executives who will make the decision on this.

http://tinyurl.com/3dtqs6

Read more here

http://techwaste20.blogspot.co.....g-api.html

But seriously, I think the crucial issue really is how ads are handled. Funnily enough, I haven’t been able to find out anything about that. I woulda thought that would be FAQ No. 1. Are G just being laissez-faire? Or are they planning something???

Google should be launching OpenSocial soon and from what I’ve gathered, it’s going to be a common API that works across a conglomerate of social networks. Seems to me like it’s a reaction to the unstoppable Facebook phenomenon. Question is, will …

That would be an interesting move. Perhaps eventually Google would be forced to use the Facebook API in its applications and Facebook would own the defacto ID and social networking standards.

“Having said this, if they all open up, then arent they all in theory dumped right back out on the internet again, which is the biggest open network there is, people first try to close, then open, then I am sure they will try to close it again.”

But technologies mature and become commodities. Eventually people will stop quibbling so much over the basic ID and social networking standards, and there will be the equivalent of “platform wars” over open standards for natural language processing, language translation, etc. There is always a convergence of some standards and the creation of new, quite different standards that often utilize the more mature standards.

But I guess the question is whether Google’s OpenSocial API matters right now. I think it does. Facebook doesn’t actually dominate social networking. Companies and individuals are going to want to develop social applications for all social networks and OpenSocial is going to provide an efficient means of doing so.

With OpenSocial, anyone could create a social networking site and expect many of the OpenSocial applications will work on it. There will surely be lots of new social networks in China in the coming several years. I bet Google will open up their social networking API to China ASAP.

Many business applications are inherently social in nature. Perhaps investment banks will create social networks on which to run market strategy games. Perhaps e-commerce sites will use the standard in their offerings so that they can more easily port their applications to different web properties.

This is a big deal. Lets see if it reaches critical mass.

Techcrunch had 23 posts yesterday (Nov. 1), 2-3 with references to Facebook. IGNORE THEM.

What really matters is what OpenSocial accomplishes after it spreads silly applications all over the place. People go to social network sites to see and manage their social graphs. If Google and its little gang run around screaming about how OpenSocial will increase interoperability, but don’t use OpenSocial to improve people’s social graphing experience, OpenSocial is just going to seem like so much hype.

So, the biggest variable in this equation: How much do LinkedIn, Hi5, and rest really want to share users? Will they encourage users to export data to other networks? Will they let users friend other sites’ users?

So, does anybody think all those competitors are really going to be that open?

Having said this, if they all open up, then arent they all in theory dumped right back out on the internet again, which is the biggest open network there is, people first try to close, then open, then I am sure they will try to close it again.

Iqbal

Facebook is more popular than porn:
http://www.time.com/time/busin.....86,00.html

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com