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.'"

Comments

social web sites

[boxlight]

A year or so ago I started a myspace page just out of curiosity. I shut it down a couple months later because it really didn't do anything for me.

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.

Re:social web sites

[kellyb9]

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.

Are you talking about Facebook as compared to MySpace? Because there are a few 18 year old supermodels who friended me just to chat about a week ago.

Re:social web sites

[Seumas]

There are two uses for typical social networks. The first is to promote your band, business or service. The other is to satisfy your ego and validate your existence by constant attention-whoring. Some people will say "I use it to keep in touch with people", but that's bullshit, because it's an idiotic substitute for the telephone, email or instant messaging. So claiming that all the hassle of getting, maintaining and monitoring a social network account just to keep in touch with a few people is like saying you only get Hustler and Club for the articles.

Re:social web sites

[Lemmy Caution]

There is a third use for them that is related to the "keeping in touch with people." The little apps in Facebook act as a mechanism for maintaining social interaction, and allow managed cross-involvement between groups of friends. In other words, I can have my brother (in Texas) join me (on the West Coast) and a colleague (in New York) over a game of Scrabble, and chat with each other. Because it aggregates all your "social attention" in one place, it isn't like trying to cobble interest in one of a million "online scrabble" sites.

And the "keep in touch" function isn't important for close friends: it's better for staying in touch with acquaintances and more distant friends, giving you a viable reason to drop a quick hello without the awkward "I know it's been years since we've chatted, but..." In the space between the deeply personal and the completely professional is a kind of sociability that is vital for many people's careers.

Re:social web sites

[PopeRatzo]

Welcome to The Latest Fad (c)(tm) on the Internet.

I think this may inadvertently be the most insightful comment on this issue.

One thing we know for sure is that the people who use the social networks are not the kind of people who are afraid to change. No matter how successful Facebook has become by the time Google gets its act together, if Google comes up with some social networking tool that is really well-designed, fun and cool, and it isn't too obnoxious in the way it uses advertising and corporate boosterism, people will flock to it, leaving Facebook in the dust.

Unfortunately for Facebook (or more precisely - to whoever buys Facebook) the type of people who have made them successful are not the type of people who are going to stay with them out of loyalty if their needs aren't being met.

Call it a "fad" if you want to, but it's a matter of "Live by the Free Market, die by the Free Market." Ultimately, these outfits' need for continual growth, and growth in the rate of growth, is what's going to kill them the same way it's killing the credit/banking business. They based their very survival on the notion that everything (prices, demand, incomes, home values, etc etc) will just trend upward forever, and they leveraged themselves to an amazing extent based on this very flimsy - nay, illogical - notion. And the ugly result of this orgy of greed has barely begun. People tend to forget what happens to the fattest hogs.

Re:social web sites

[flyingsquid]

You can make similar complaints about using ANY new technology to socialize.

Why text someone, when it's an idiotic substitute for an email? But why email them, when it's a lame substitute for calling them on the phone? Why call them on the phone, when you could just talk to the person face to face? And why on earth would you want to talk to the person, when you could socialize using old fashioned grunts and gestures, which worked perfectly well for our chimp-like ancestors?

I guarantee that in a few years, some new technology will come along and people will use it to socialize. And there will be people saying, "Why would I want to use that newfangled technology to communicate with my friends, when I can use an old-fashioned social networking site?"

Re:social web sites

[mdwh2]

Your statement makes about as much sense as saying the only reason for having a Slashdot account is to satisfy your ego and validate your existence by constant attention-whoring. Who would go to all the hassle of getting, maintaining and monitoring a Slashdot account for any other reason? Look at you with your +5 by writing a trendy bashing of social networking, if that's not attention whoring?

Some people will say "I use it to keep in touch with people", but that's bullshit, because it's an idiotic substitute for the telephone, email or instant messaging.

Okay I'll bite: Why? Email is push rather than pull. Instant message requires everyone you want to address to be online at that moment, and telephone is even worse, being only one-on-one.

The pull rather than push is important - rather than me deciding who would want to read whatever I want to tell them, people I know can decide for themselves. In fact, it's email which is far more likely to represent ego satisfying, validation and attention whoring, in that you send out messages flooding people's inboxes, assuming they care about your petty life. Same with telephone and IM really.

It's sad really, I'd have thought that geeks would be willing to accept that some uses of technology may be more appropriate than others (even if it's not for them, it may be for others), rather than giving in to impressions of what's trendy and what isn't (what sort of technical criticism is "attention-whoring"? That's the sort of thing people take the piss out of MySpace for).

Re:social web sites

[Sloppy]

The first is to promote your band, business or service.
...
Some people will say "I use it to keep in touch with people"

The third use is to keep in touch with bands; the flipside of the first use. You gotta be there, to get promoted to. MySpace is a pretty good way to stay on top of when/where your favorite local bands are playing.

Of course, once you start doing that, you also get to satisfy your ego and validate your existence with attention whoring. ;-)

There's not much hassle with maintaining/monitoring, though. MySpace has atrocious usability, but people tend to learn to adapt to even the worst interfaces. (Ever watch someone copy a file on MS Windows with cut/paste?)

Hi!

[Mateo_LeFou]

Your slashdot comment looked really interesting to me and I'd like to meet you. See pics of me at www.mateo_lefou.com CYA

Re:Hi!

[Chosen Reject]

I'd like to meet you

CYA

Thanks for the warning

Needs to find its niche

[Cleon]

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.

Re:Needs to find its niche

[Sloppy]

OpenSocial has to find its focus--it needs something to separate it from the other social networking sites beyond merely being a Google project.

OpenSocial is an API, not a site. All the existing sites you mentioned, could use OpenSocial if they wanted to.

Re:Needs to find its niche

[blitzkrieg3]

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.

I think you're really missing the point. Google wants all these different networks, that have different niches, to have access to each other. So now I'll still have a facebook for friends at school, a myspace for my band, and a flickr for photos, but I won't need to upload all my photos to EVERY website using they're own implementation of photos.

There will still be different niches, but I'll be able to manage each of my different "personalities" (if you will) from one place.

Re:Needs to find its niche

[fczuardi]

...that is also what OpenSocial is not. OpenSocial is a set of standard methods and libraries for app developers to ask one particular social network for information. It is a way to provide compatibility for social networks addons, not a place or central place for anything.

people will be switching for another couple years

[justdrew]

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...

Not too late

[PolarBearFire]

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.

Re:Not too late

[El Cabri]

There's not going to be a clear winner : several social networking websites will co-exist, because the value of a network depends both of who's in it and who's not.

Worried about Google investors

[El Cabri]

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.

Re:Worried about Google investors

[Sloppy]

how do they actually plan to lock in their position ?

One and a half ways, as far as I can tell:

1. If they can get multiple (popular) sites to use the same API, so that add-on developers only have to write one version of the code, then that creates a feedback loop. It makes site developers want to use the API in order to take advantage of existing add-ons, and it makes add-on developers want to use the API to take advantage of existing sites.
2. The API is sold to the public as being for developers. But one of the things I quickly noticed about it, is that it's good for more than that. It's also great for crawlers. Why crawl a site and try to make sense out of their HTML structure, when there's an API call to get someone's friends list? If sites adopt this API, it will allow Google (not really lock-in; any other crawler could do it too) to make semantic sense of "social" websites, which happen to be popular. Maybe some day you'll be able to google "friends:El Cabri" and get all sorts of ideas for ways the info could be [ab]used. Crawling is part of Google's business anyway (they're a/the leader) so this could strengthen them.

Re:Worried about Google investors

[PolarBearFire]

That's a main reason why I hesitate to invest in Google stock. I see a lot of potential but then I also see a lot of alternatives to what Google offers. Strictly judging Google as a business I cannot predict the course they are going to take. They are full of brilliant people and should be churning out alot of great stuff, but if you think about it a lot of the succesful stuff they have have been bought not made inhouse.

Re:Worried about Google investors

[timeOday]

Yeah, what's the point of even being in business if you have to compete fairly instead of locking people in?

I'd argue that most products and services are not natural monopolies; otherwise, capitalism would not work and no country would use it. Microsoft's position is great if you happen to be Bill Gates, but it's a drag on everybody else in every other industry (why do people outside slashdot fail to recognize that?)

Google better thank their lucky stars there's no search lock-in, because otherwise google could never have displaced altavista, yahoo, microsoft, and everybody else who came along before google. At the same time, google better stay on its toes.

Re:Worried about Google investors

[Otter]

Google is a great company filled with brilliant people like maybe no company has ever been.

I don't believe that for a second (Bell Labs, for example? Toyota, Lockheed, Merck, IBM, Philips, Sony, Xerox...?) but wouldn't it be sad if it were true? They should come over here and develop new drugs; I'll be glad to cover making Web 2.0 apps that never get out of beta.

Re:Worried about Google investors

[0xdeadbeef]

Google's "network effect asset" is called the Internet.

Remember, like television, their customer isn't you, it's the advertiser.

Re:Worried about Google investors

[Ohio Calvinist]

In the beginning Google was attractive to me, (and most people I know), because it was "clean." No annoying graphics, just a simple text box, that produced very readable, very good results, with advertising that was textual, and not a eppilepsy enducing "you won a playstation" flashing banner.

Their search products such as Image Search, Froogle, News, etc... all did the same thing... clean UI, easy to use, good results.

For their applications, I think people moved to Gmail because again, the clean UI, they already used Google, and the space was unprecidented. Most ISPs still had 30MB caps, as did most other freemail services. For their other applications, I think it is a combination of brand recognition (like my Aunt, who thinks Yahoo "is" the Internet), Google fanboi-ism, and the assumption that everything they do will turn into gold, and they they won't fold overnight like a lot of services have the potential to do.

With all this stream, its enough to drive advertisement revenue. The difficulty will be if that dries up, and they have pissed off investors, thousands of employees with their hands in all kinds of stuff, trying to find a way to support the massive infrastructure. I think that is why they are looking to diversify their income paths because they know they won't be the hip kid on the block forever.

Re:Worried about Google investors

[slashdot_commentator]

In addition to sloppy's excellent points,

1) Google counts on the same psychological effect that the entire advertising industry counts on to keep people consuming its product: branding. The average human beings' tendency is to stick with what is familiar. They were able to provide a search engine service (at the time) markedly superior to what was available (Yahoo, Altavista, & Hotbot), so now people go to them for searches, rather than some place else. Its the same with McDonald's, Charmin, and Starbucks. They count on human nature for "lock-in". If they get complacent, like GM, Hoover, or Wang, someone new will come along, that will offer something better, and new guy will become the next Google.

2) While I think Google have magnitudes of technological opportunity to improve its search product, the company, in its own way, is looking to "win". Google doesn't need to plow tons of resources and attention into its search/advertising engine (to stay alive). They prioritize looking for the next undiscovered thing that will knock them a industry home run.

Take the SEO biz. There are guys that will (relatively) openly talk about what they do, or how they approach ways to increase their link count. Besides it making money for them (in page hits), they don't try to be proprietary with their techniques, because they know "winning" means coming up with some new way of getting ahead. They believe in their talent (to think of new ways of getting ahead). Its like A-Rod giving away batting tips. He can afford to do so, because it doesn't matter that competitors have the information; its still not going to help them outperform A-Rod. (In the case of SEO guys, it helps them to reveal stuff; it increases their page traffic.)

That's what makes Google so scary to companies like Microsoft. Neither of them even care about maintaining their dominance in their niches, they're looking for the next great thing that will make them billions. And Google has an advantage in talent, and can leave Microsoft in the rear view.

Being the ubermonopoly, having the marketing highground, means you can ensure your continued prosperity, even with egregious gaffes. Being ahead means being to dictate the rules to the game. If you're in the rear view, you're reduced to reacting. Any chess player should understand this concept.

3) In the case of opensocial, as sloppy pointed out, its a means of improving its search and advertising product. So Google invested into it. If Google get to define the popularly accepted API, they can control how the next technology gets implemented (and monetized). Google thinks it can put out a superior product to what is currently available, so it is now making the attempt. If they're right, then developers and users will go to it, because it offers them something Google's competitors don't.

I hope you can see now that "lock-in" is an outdated concept in the technology business world. The game is about creating/defining the next moneymaker.

Of course it isn't too late

[kingduct]

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).

Bias?

[lixee]

News.com is Murdoch-domain if I'm not mistaken. Can someone remind me of who owns MySpace?

Re:Bias?

[prostoalex]

if I'm not mistaken

That's a big if. Perhaps they should stick a 121st CNET logo/reference somewhere on the page, since it's so easy to miss.

Quote of the year (in hell) from the story...

[tyroneking]

"There's a riff that OpenSocial could die on the vine," said Forrester Research senior analyst Jeremiah Owyang

Riff? Die on the vine?

Compare to Facebook's

[aftk2]

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 .

Google is right on time

[laudunum]

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.