Trying to order my thoughts about OpenSocial
Culled from a discussion with a colleague about OpenSocial who asks me if we really need another social network.
Let’s say you have a MySpace page and you sign up for a Google-powered ShareMyMusic app that functions, LastFM style to let people know what the last ten tunes you’ve played on MySpace are. Now in the context of Facebook, this would only work on Facebook.
BUT, if LastFM, MySpace, Pandora and the other big music social networks - and other providers of music media with user profiles - all sign up to OpenSocial, you could invite people you know - or target them - on other networks without having to actually join those networks. Think of Facebook apps that could spill out of Facebook and onto other sites. Or if you could just transport your LinkedIn profile to a more specialist niche business networking site or pull people into your LinkedIn network from different locations (blog postings?). Or instantly turn a group on Orkut into a Ning community…
I don’t know if any of this will be the way OpenSocial works but it’s certainly the style of thinking that’s seems to have gone into it. Strategically brilliant but only if it delivers brilliantly. This is why Google are willing to be elastic about deadlines and why we should be patient and manage our expectations about OpenSocial 1.0 (note: more measured, less optimistic take on that here, which also addresses issues of why Google is ducking existing open standards. One possible answer - take up is small and there are too many of them?)
Key take-out - OpenSocial is NOT a Just Another Social Network - it’s something that links the social graphs of different networks the way URLs and web services link websites and transactional web applications. It’s potentially (and all we have to go on so far is potential) a genuine glimpse of Web 2.5 (lets leave Web 3.0 until later, shall we?). In comparison, Facebook is ultimately still an old-fashioned walled garden site in its current iteration, though with deep pockets and big friends, it isn’t going to be threatened easily.
Supporters of OpenID, I should add, see OpenSocial as not much more than another “skirmish in the war between walled gardens” full stop.
P.S. And this is funny. And painfully true.
Filed under: Facebook, Google, OpenSocial, social networks | Tagged: Facebook, Google, OpenSocial, social networks
Michael, belated 2008 best wishes. I was travelling and disconnected when OpenSocial announced so thanks for the analysis. I’d be really interested in your prognosis. What kind of an impact do you imagine OpenSocial will have and in what time frame?
Especially interested in your Facebook observations in light of the Facebook Groups in Business action research investigation colleagues and I have been conducting since early December. We report our results to the KIN Workshop March 6. Any chance you will be there? And good luck with your research project. Intriguing. Best, Jenny