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Google's OpenSocial Too Late To Be a Win?
DeeQ writes with a link to a post on News.com's social networking blog. Author Caroline McCarthy wonders if Google's OpenSocial initiative has missed its moment in the sun. It's been something like six weeks now since the search giant offered up its open-source social media initiative ... but where have been the usual swift victories? Moreover, OpenSocial isn't done yet, and it's not expected until sometime next year. In the meantime Facebook is capitalizing on Google's delay, and other networks are stepping in as well. "Kraus adds that some of the independent platform strategies would be necessary even if OpenSocial were finalized. One of them is LinkedIn's 'InApps,' which also aims to spread LinkedIn's data and influence outside the business-oriented social network through partnerships with other Web sites. 'OpenSocial so far is really about how developers embed their application into a social network,' Kraus explained. 'A good chunk of LinkedIn's APIs is about how LinkedIn extends their social-networking data into other sites.'"
A couple months back I got a facebook account, and while it's more functional that the myspace page, the vast majority of the content I see there is silliness and spam. I find the applications and installation stuff a annoyance. It's also not very customizable appearance wise. Other than an occasional vacation photo from a friend I rarely see, there's not much there that helps me. I'm considering canceling that too.
What I'd really like is something like facebook that's pure communication function, and less gibberish and marketing. Actually, something like a web-based AOL could work -- email, chat rooms, IM, all built into one facebook-like web site. More elegant looking and customizable.
Is that what OpenSocial is? I have not tried it.
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My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The thing is, all of these social networking sites have a certain focus and niche.
Facebook, which started out as something for college students, is still generally focused on that particular market. Moreover, unlike MySpace, it's rather strictly controlled; you can really only search for friends in your particular networks. Plus, the inclusion (and encouragement) of user-created applications gives FaceBook a level of functionality that other networking sites lack.
LinkedIn is specifically targeted for professional, rather than social, networking.
MySpace seems to be aiming itself more at media integration, organization/campaign building, musicians, that sort of thing. (IOW, more "commercial" than the other two, if that makes any sense.)
For it to work, OpenSocial has to find its focus--it needs something to separate it from the other social networking sites beyond merely being a Google project. If it doesn't, it's just going to go the way of Friendster--it'll be out there, but nobody will really be using it.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
consolidation and settling in haven't started yet, google has plenty of time, if they come out with good stuff, it'll peel people away from the others no problem. Also, there's still a lot of people who haven't wadded in to the whole thing yet...
Nothings too late in this era. We don't even have a clear current winner. Depending on demographics, some sites are stronger than others. Also as we can see with Facebook, any public screwups can quickly change things. If Facebook hadn't reacted as fast and strongly to allay people fears regarding privacy alot of legitimate users would have migrated elsewhere. I've signed up on Myspace and Facebook but since I've a bad habit of not providing personal information to strangers these services don't really appeal to me. But from what I saw there's really nothing one has that the other couldn't implement.
Google is a great company filled with brilliant people like maybe no company has ever been. But there's something I never understood about it : how do they actually plan to lock in their position ?
They do many things very well, but I don't see any of their major services from which you cannot switch to a competitor on a whim. Let's be honest : for 99% of searches, several other search engines will give you results that are at least as relevant or useful as Google's. Even if objectively you would find any google service to be slightly superior than its counterpart, there really is barely any friction from switching if you don't like their name anymore or if you feel like giving a chance to a competitor. They don't even have any notable "network effect" assets like eBay, Paypal, Facebook, Amazon Marketplace and recommendations, the IMDB, etc.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Too late? That would mean that people are brand loyal. They aren't.
I looked at the OpenSocial API. I think any Google initiative has some potential. However, this API is such a mess, really a hodgepodge of cruft, mainly from Orkut, that it won't go anywhere not because it's too late but simply because it's so ill considered.
If they created a well thought out API it would get much more traction.
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Dude(tte)s,
As someone who has used facebook a bit, I can say it sucks! There are tons of opportunties to make something better (or worse, depending on your point of view), and Google is one company trying to do so.
Was Google too late when it started its search engine years after the first engines? Was gmail too late because Rocketmail was first? Was wikipedia too late, because Brittanica was already there? For that matter, was Facebook too late, because email had already existed for decades?
If a tool comes up that is a lot better, it has the chance to succeed. Since Facebook is so crappy, we should expect that in the short term (next year) either it will get a lot better or there will probably be something that takes its place in the sun. I have no opinion as to whether that will be opensocial or something else (let us not forget that the thing that gets everyone's attention next year may very well be an economic depression that puts the dotcom bust to shame).
Too Late To Be A Win?
Yeah, I guess time has always counted, like with IBM and the personal computers, or MS Windows and the graphical operating systems, or iPod and the portable media players, or Google and search engines (yes, there was altavista, excite and yahoo before google) or Xbox and video game consoles or...
geez, you get the idea.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
News.com is Murdoch-domain if I'm not mistaken. Can someone remind me of who owns MySpace?
Res publica non dominetur
"There's a riff that OpenSocial could die on the vine," said Forrester Research senior analyst Jeremiah Owyang
Riff? Die on the vine?
I don't know - I was skeptical about Facebook's API when I learned that our company would be developing apps for its platform. But it's actually pretty impressive. You have several different views and footprints at your application's disposal, a number of different ways to promote your app, an easy route to making your application interactive (FBML) as well as more advanced methods (FQL, the web service API).
Contrast that with OpenSocial. I recently wrote a white paper on it, which I wouldn't mind getting feedback on. It should make OpenSocial's strengths (and its significant weaknesses) pretty apparent:
A First Look at OpenSocial
Answering Questions About Google's Effort at Standardizing Social Network Widgets, and the Creation of Your First OpenSocial Widget .
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
It seems to me that Google is right on time: the time in the sun for social networks seems to be about up. Call it a land rush; call it a bubble; call it a craze. The social networks like FaceBook, MySpace, and the social network apps like Digg enjoyed a moment in the sun as the fleshed out one dimension of the webbernet that hadn't really been fully articulated. Now that it has, you're seeing a lot of the ideas articulated by those sites rolled into more mature, more complex, and more interesting sites and services. Of course, community for the sake of community was something I always thought was best done face to face, sitting next to someone on a barstool or at a coffee shop. Me, if I am going to look for community on the web, which is really more like what we used to call "association" (that is, a gathering of like-minded individuals), I'm going to look for sites that possess the traits I'm interested in. Like SlashDot or ArsTechnica et cetera.
I don't want my LinkedIn profile on other sites. All I'll get is spam.
LinkedIn has a problem with "LinkedIn Open Networkers", i.e. spammers, who just use LinkedIn to troll for contacts. Since LinkedIn doesn't have forums, they troll by using the "LinkedIn Answers" feature to ask bogus "questions". Much more of that and the question-answering system will be useless.
Where was Facebook three years ago? Nowhere, that's where! The next social networking site will work different, it will be called... well, when I finish it I'll tell ya.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
All Open Social is is a universal API format that can to code widgets and the like across Myspace, and all the other "I've never heard of these". In no way does it connect these sites, so I really don't see the purpose if I don't even know the names of half the sites it works on!
From summary, "where have been the usual swift victories?". Gmail is still in Beta. It's taken years and years to get a customer base and most peons I know still use Hotmail. Google Search itself took a long time to catch on after being late comer in the Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves.com, crowded marketplace. Sometimes first-to-market is a good strategy, but in other times simply good software wins out in the end. That said, I have no experience with OpenSocial, but this seems to be someone saying, "1,000,000 people didn't subscribe in the first day!? It's a failure!1!"
Huh? What swift victories? It took Google Search years to reach the top. Google Mail still isn't dominant, not even close, etc... etc... Googles only real victories are AdWords, Search, and Maps. Their other 'victories' come from buying existing lines of business (Blogger, YouTube) or from having no real competitors (Docs).
Fact is, when it comes to social networking, Google blew it with Orkut - and then waited far too long to fix the problems there, or to try again elsewhere. But that isn't really untypical of Google - they seem awfully unfocused. For as many people as they hire, updates seem to come pretty far apart and scattershot.
Wait, Hustler and Club have articles?
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
What kind of a retarded, boring name is OpenSocial? No wonder it isn't winning anybody's heart. The darn thing has a name that only a mother could love.
...fill in the form at owonder.com/contact and if and when our service goes live, we will let you know.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Mosaic > Netscape > AOL > Explorer > Firefox/Safari/Opera > ? Classmates.com > Friendster > Friends Reunited (UK) > Bebo/MySpace/Facebook > ? Altavista > Excite > Ask > Yahoo > Google > ? And maybe something new that replaces all the above? Leading to... ? > ? > ? > ? :-)
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
A lot of Google's projects have been steady gainers rather than swift victories. OpenSocial clearly has a tough road ahead, but I wouldn't count it out just because it's off to a slow start; that's simply to be expected for this kind of project.
What victories? Everything google has done (except google search) is a miserable failure. They try to write great software, yet some kids always beat them. They give out closed source Picasa, nobody uses it. Gmail is fun because of 2GB storage. I won't even get in to knol, opensocial, google-flickr, blogger, GOHP, GWT, patronizing open source, etc.
But there is an answer for this. Google is afraid that somebody else is going to take over their search engine. So instead of setting up their defence, they start first to attack. They go after every possible software/service/trend out there. In order to distract people and keep them away from google search & the data mining facilities sold to FBI.