Six months ago, OpenSocial was nothing but a list of promised partnerships. But the social network application platform backed by Google has made a lot of progress since then as those partners started to go live with their OpenSocial Apps. First there was MySpace and Orkut, then Hi5, and most recently Friendster. All told, if you add up the various social networks that are now live with OpenSocial, it reaches a total of 350 million users. And it will soon reach 500 million, as four more social networks and services prepare to launch by the end of of September (see chart above).
Google’s Joe Kraus gave me an update today on OpenSocial’s progress. He wouldn’t say which partners would launch next, but by the size of that pink bar in the graph above, one of them is relatively large—about the same size as Orkut. (My guess is that it will be either Bebo or Six Apart). He also mentioned some partners, such as imeem, launched without ever contacting Google (thanks to Apache Shindig) and that at this point only 10 percent of the engineers hashing out the OpenSocial specifications are from Google.
So how many OpenSocial apps are actually being used? There are about 4,500 different apps so far, which have been installed more than 150 million times. I couldn’t get daily active user numbers across all OpenSocial partners, but for Hi5 about 50 percent of members use an OpenSocial app at least once a day. There are 1,800 OpenSocial apps on hi5 alone, which have been installed 66 million times, so that may be representative of OpenSocial usage in general.
In contrast, Facebook, which is open-sourcing its own platform for developers, has nearly 37,000 apps, which have been installed 715 million times. RockYou’s apps alone have been installed 124 million times on Facebook.
Despite the strides it’s made in such a short time, OpenSocial still has alot of catching up to do.
See all
Post
From experience I can tell you developing for HI5 sucks and it’s a waste of time!!!
another follow up…the HI5 numbers are dubious. We have bunch of installs but zero activity. Perhaps we should write the UI copy in Spanish or something.
Yea Ive been pretty unhappy with hi5 activity so far as well
It seems like there are too many social networks now.
It seems like there are too many social networks now.
The real question is how many *PEOPLE* are using open social applications. Looking at this graph, there is no adoption curve. Is this assuming that 100% of MySpace users are actively using Open Social Applications? Is there a 0% overlap between Friendster and Hi5? I hate to be a skeptic, but I do not think it’s 350 Million by any stretch.
It’s “a lot” — not “alot.” Crikey. Journalism 101, people.
Difference in no of applications on Facebook vs Opensocial has also got to do with how much these websites promoted their use as a part of culture and how much their users accepted those as part of their experience on the network.
In public memory, Facebook always had this extensibility and zuckerberg’s team did everything to promote that functionality. To some extent, these extensions made the experience on Facebook different from earlier avatars of Networking and gave users a reason to revisit the website. Orkut has recently launched its own version of applications and anybody who has been a long time user, can surely see that they have caught up quite quickly.
Having said that opensocial sites do have a lot of catching up to do.
Vaneet
http://www.fablegod.com
Dude…did google just take over social networking? And these guys just gave it away too. lol
It will be interesting to see how the adoption rate of OpenSocial increases over the second half of 2008 as it has made incredible progress in the first half. Also, having Google as a backer, not a bad option right now.
http://kreuzer33.wordpress.com.....ion-users/
Keep in mind that OpenSocial started out of the gate banning the kind of spammy viral activity that FaceBook has been famous for, and is recently seeking to control. Combine that with the fact that OpenSocial only recently matured as a platform, and the app numbers are easy to understand. The question really is, what will things look like a year from now?
What’s clear I think is that with so many people constantly contributing to evolving the OpenSocial spec, it will be hard for FaceBook to keep up, and is FaceBook willing to give up the crown jewels and hand over control of the facebook platform spec to the public?
Um, yes. They’ve open-sourced their platform code.
Open source is not the same as open-specification. The question is, are they willing to let outsiders dictate the specification that they themselves have to adhere to? It’s one thing to dump a bunch of shovelware on the public, it’s quite another to let everyone define the API *and* stick with it.
With OpenSocial, if the spec evolves to have a new foo() method, then this becomes officially part of OpenSocial and Google has to implement it as well.
The OpenSocial platform is whatever developers and users want it to be based on supply and demand. It’s companies like hi5 that are leading the container band wagon to provide innovative, seamless ways for people to expose engaging, immersive applications on social networks, opening the doors to new, potential revenue streams. If I was an engineer, creating apps for the OpenSocial environment would definitely be a priority.
-Adriana (yes, I work at hi5)
Very useful article with very useful data. Thanks.
How are these numbers even real??? This makes no sense…. how do you get to 350M when there aren’t even that many people on those social networks???
Is Google counting “installs” ?? It can’t be users.
This seems to be some type of “spin” PR to make people think Google Open Social is working… but I don’t buy it….
Let’s do some simple calculation.
The Earth has around 5,000 million users. So 7% of total population of the Earth are using OpenSocial if they are all equally accessing the Internet. We know this is not true, and those in developed countries should have higher percentage of using Open Social.
Ask yourself, do you feel that 1 out of 10 of people you know is using OpenSocial?
In short, I would regard this article is cheap buzz.
Adding unique users of different independent networks is mathematically wrong. Wenn diagram.
I find it surprising but nowhere on the blogosphere have I seen a mention of zembly (www.zembly.com). Its a product from SUN who apparently claim that using this will make building apps on OpenSocial, iPhone, Facebook etc. a cinch.
I saw a demo of Zembly at a Meetup recently and it lived up to the expectations: GUI tools and web forms that generated an app in the course of a 5 minute presentation. Very cool. Many companies are moving to provide tools for fast app/widget development and syndication - it’ll be interesting to see how they interact with the growing audience of app users.
I love what Andy Wong said about this article. If you stop and think about the number…do they make sense? So many people leap to believing what they read. I love it when someone stops and says, “Hold on…”
Well done.
Still waiting to read about OpenSocial anywhere but in tech focused blogs…
I did a Google News search thinking I could drop 2 or 3 news articles on you from WSJ or NW or whatever. Turns out you are right! Every bit of news about OpenSocial emanated from tech this and tech that.
That being said, OpenSocial is real. Google just has to figure out how to drive the marketing side.