Google hits a big one in the social networking space
Nov 1st, 2007 by dabloguiman
Google has announced “OpenSocial”, a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web designed to create an alternative developer platform to that offered by Facebook.
Founding partners of the project include: Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.
And today “MySpace”, the world’s largest social network, announced that they are joining forces with Google in the launch OpenSocial. The partnership spearheads an initiative to standardize and simplify the development of social applications.
OpenSocial’s three APIs will allow developers to access the following core functions and information on participating social networks, referred to as “hosts”:
* Profile Information (user data)
* Friends Information (social graph)
* Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)
This is a huge development in the social networking space. Developers will be able to write applications once and use the same code (based on HTML and Javascripit) in many of these platforms instead of having to write and port the same application for each network.
This is different from Facebook which uses a proprietary language (Facebook Markup Language or FBML) in a walled-off environment.
It is also a big development for Google who hopes to capitalize on the efficacy of placing ads within the applications themselves. It has recently become more apparent that placing ads in applications within social networks like Facebook is a more effective way of promoting a product that placing ads in personal pages.
Technorati Tags: Facebook, Google, MySpace, Orkut, Web 2.0
