opensocial

A small New York-based social media start-up called FindMeOn intends to send Google a letter asking that it change the name of its OpenSocial initiative, CNET News.com has learned. FindMeOn founded a project called OpenSN (Open Social Networking) in 2006, and according to founder and CEO Jonathan Vanasco, the similarity of its name to Google's newer project is getting in the way of business.

The company also has tentative plans for legal action.

FindMeOn, which develops technology to aggregate profile data from various social-networking sites, created OpenSN as a way to convert a profile from one social network … Read more

When Google unveiled its OpenSocial developer initiative at the end of October, observers hailed it as the future of the social Web.

But is the search king already too late to the party?

It's been over six weeks, and OpenSocial--which uses open-source code to allow any participating social media site to implement a common set of application program interfaces (APIs) and create "universal" applications--isn't finished, though developers believe it will be ready early in 2008. In the meantime, a number of partners have launched independent developer platform strategies, and Facebook has announced that other social … Read more

This post has been updated with information about Bebo's implementation of Facebook's code.

And now, for something we didn't see coming: Facebook has announced that the architecture for its developer platform will be made available to other social-networking sites, potentially rendering moot the criticism that its strategy is too "closed"--and potentially dealing a huge blow to Google's yet-to-launch OpenSocial initiative.

Facebook senior platform manager Ami Vora posted a blog entry Wednesday with the announcement. "(We) want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform … Read more

Friendster has fully launched its developer platform with more than 180 applications available to its 56 million registered users, the social-networking site said Tuesday.

The company first announced the platform on October 25.

The developer platform was initially piloted by some well-known names in the widget world: Slide, RockYou, Imeem, Jangl, Clearspring, and Gbox. Companies and individual developers participating in the program are allowed to advertise anywhere in the application space and keep all revenue.

According to the social network, the platform is going to be as "open" as possible to make it easy for applications designed for … Read more

TechCrunch is reporting that Plaxo's Pulse has jumped "an order of magnitude" in adoption (from 200,000 connections to over one million), as Plaxo's VP of Marketing John McCrea notes on his blog.

Lesson learned? According to McCrea, "open" is good for business:

When we launched the beta of Pulse in August, we made a strategic bet -- that the market was ripe for an "open social network" (rather than yet another "walled garden").… Read more

The launch of Google's OpenSocial platform earlier this month might have been more PR than anything, as many of the third-party partners implementing the new developer standard won't be releasing anything for months.

Instead, OpenSocial-related announcements have been rolling out slowly: one of the latest is that social music site Last.fm has created OpenSocial widgets designed for use on Ning, a site that allows any person or business to create a specialized social network. (According to Ning, more than 123,000 networks have been created so far.)

Ning network creators and members can now install the Last.… Read more

With dual announcements in New York and London on Tuesday, social networking site Bebo unveiled its "Open Media" platform, a way for media brands to build a presence in the community with music and video content.

Think of it as a sort of hybrid between MySpace's MySpaceTV portal and Facebook's new "pages" for companies. It's an "open platform" that can be joined without licensing agreements and charges no fee to content providers, but it's limited to entertainment content like video and music. According to a release from the company, this … Read more

In my recent interview with Windows Live VP Chris Jones, I also got his take on whether Microsoft might take part in Google's just-announced OpenSocial platform as well as his thoughts on where the Mac fits into the Windows Live strategy. Here's what he had to say.

On OpenSocial: "I think on OpenSocial we're honestly just still looking at it. It's more of a gadget platform than a social-networking approach. It's a way to add gadgets to pages with a couple of extensions to it. That's been a very interesting thing for Facebook … Read more