naveen’s weblog

Awesome!!

Looks like the battle lines have been drawn! in sand ofcourse :). Eric Schmidt and Chris DeWolfe announced earlier today that Myspace is going to support the OpenSocial API being furthered by Google, Ning, and a bunch of other social networks relevant not in the US, but elsewhere in the world. For the time being atleast, facebook has not committed to supporting the API.

This is simply a brilliant move by Google. I admit I was thinking just this morning that this effort wouldn’t amount to much, as long as myspace and facebook both refuse to join it. It seems obvious in hindsight, and probably needed some chess-like thinking ahead, but myspace simply had no choice but to join the effort. Their platform effort was always going to be perceived as an also-ran; their network is being perceived as a boring, old, spammy place to be. facebook *is* the new hotness, and in this game, perception is reality.

By supporting the OpenSocial effort, myspace instantly lends credibility to OpenSocial, and at the same time, gets to reap the benefit of being perceived as visionary. And the developers win too - this is therefore a win-win-win negotiation, as Michael Scott would say.

Facebook’s secret sauce all along has been the “social graph”. It opened it up to outside developers by letting them write apps to harness this information about the users’ real-life connections, but was always super protective of the data itself, not allowing application developers to store any of this information outside of its own servers.

In one move, Google demolished this competitive advantage, making an API that’ll let all sorts of web-based services expose the social graph information they’re aware of. The API is not yet out, but hopefully (and I expect) there will be ways to stitch together connection information from multiple sources into one, and use that information in your app. Imagine the information from GMail, myspace, linkedin and Plaxo, all being utilized by one app, which renders on all four networks, giving you an appropriate (and perhaps tailored) experience on all four!

Without the competitive advantage of this connection information, facebook’s impending SocialAds-network is going to be just another ad network that tracks your interests. This new network was supposed to be facebook’s coming out party to the money making game, but Google nullified the threat to its advertising business (which really is what Google’s core business is). Brilliant by Google..

Another winner in all of this is the developer community. I was dreading the prospect of having to write and maintain N front-ends to my application. Now, I only have to write two, and hopefully soon, just one. There are going to be specializations, because each social network container is going to extend the API by supporting additional functionality, but that’s definitely more manageable than having to learn FBML, FQL, MySpaceHTML etc..

As a developer, my humble request to facebook - Please support OpenSocial! I will love you more if you do. And as your dear friend Mr. Ballmer would say, its all about the “developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, ……, developers“.

For an exposition of how OpenSocial’s APIs work in practice, and what kinds of things are enabled by it, check out Marc Andreessen’s blog - Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web and Open Social: a screencast and screen shots