Google OpenSocial
Posted by scottjduffy on December 6, 2007
I’ve written in the past about the Facebook applications platform, and how marketers can look to leverage it to build their brands.
Everyone and their brother has their own Facebook app now. But I still think the platform is underutilitized and we are a while away from seeing its full potential in use.
Google is not dumb of course. They see this developer excitement for applications on the web, and it’s all happening on Facebook. Since they can’t buy Facebook (who have reportedly turned down offers for $1.6 and $2 billion in the past), they’ve decided to compete instead. And their Facebook killer is called OpenSocial.
OpenSocial is an application platform that promises to allow you to build an application once, and run it on Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn… basically on any social network that supports it. OpenSocial takes the application hosting away from Facebook, where they can profit from it, and moves it to Google.
There was a lot of excitement when OpenSocial was announced. Anytime Google moves into a space, there’s excitement. Obviously not everything they do turns to gold. After all, they have their own blogging platform (Blogger) that’s losing to WordPress, and their own word processor and spreadsheet application (Google Docs) that has yet to impress anyone.
So is OpenSocial a Blogger, or a GMail? Boring or a platform killer?
The jury is still out. But early reports from developers trying to use the platform aren’t good. Basically, the platform isn’t very robust, has too many critical features on the “to do” list, and in fact many of the important architectural design decisions about the service are still to be decided.
Marketers looking to develop a social networking application to connect with their customers are advised to continue working on the Facebook platform for now. Even though OpenSocial is supposed to be ready for the spring, it looks like it won’t contain everything you need to make a cross-platform application. And in 12 months from now when it is ready, maybe things will have changed too much?
This entry was posted on December 6, 2007 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Facebook. Tagged: Google, LinkedIn, MySpace, OpenSocial, social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
