Nearly every time proponents of open standards confront companies clinging to a proprietary view of technology, you know who's going to have the angels on their side. So I'm still scratching my head over Facebook's decision to reply to the new OpenSocial proposal with a raised middle finger.
Pawn to Queen 4, check. Nice move, Eric.
(Credit: Dan Farber)On the surface, I suppose, Facebook might find the proposal easy to dismiss as yet more industry politics. But it's not every day that Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.'s MySpace decide to create a nonprofit foundation. In doing so, they are pledging to ensure that OpenSocial stays a community-driven spec "in perpetuity." And here's the delish inference: they leave it up to the rest of us to draw the obviously invidious comparison with Facebook, which wants no part of this budding band of brothers. (And just to drive home the point that Google's all about "openness," the company says it is donating the OpenSocial trademark as well as the Web site.)
What to make of all this? There's little that Google CEO Eric Schmidt does out of charity when it comes to the tech business and skeptics are rightly going to look hard at what's in it for Google. We're not talking about Mother Teresa here. And there will be close scrutiny of the process when the participants involved in this project sit down to draft a charter and set up rules for choosing a board.
But normal suspicion will take you only so far. Let's also acknowledge that there's also a big upside for developers in Tuesday's OpenSocial announcement. Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm took the words out of my mouth with the analogy with Mozilla.
The core companies will still contribute to the code, but as of July 1, it will become a community effort. This move legitimizes the idea of a social network as a platform, as it offers the ability to develop for a variety of social networks in one go; it also signals that social networks are becoming a commodity.
Facebook may think sitting this one out is a strategy, but I don't think many developers will agree. The last thing developers want is to go through the extra drudgery (and expense) involved in writing different versions of the same program for several sites.
Will users really care about OpenSocial? Wrong question for now. It's obviously early in the game, but winning the hearts and minds of developers will help answer that question. And if Facebook's interim answer is to cling to the status quo, Mark Zuckerberg should consult Steve Ballmer to see how well that tack worked against the open-source movement.
I wanted to repost this reader response to my Monday blog about a slowdown in venture capital funding for Web 2.0 start-ups.
"tehrani625" as he or she is called, comes off as thoroughly unimpressed with the status quo and says it's time to go beyond the conventionally stale thinking about social networks. Take a look and let me know what you think.
"I am bored of all the new social networks it would be nice if some one took something like open id and attached a friends list and then you would manage the thing from a central home page. That would give all the social aspects you need. Because you would add the various apps kinda like a face book page. Then it would connect to a storage service and some sort of email service. Then you would have all your games synced to this account."
"You would create an avatar that would work with all the virtual world services. Then you would have all your other type of productivity apps attached. So then everything would be integrated. So if you make a document on your computer and it auto syncs to the online service and is automatically added to your online word processor. All these services are available but all of them are all over the place. Why can't they all be integrated? More or less.
"It would be nice to have an account and then not have to create an account every time I want to post on a certain forum. But that's just what I think. It would also be nice to have integration into ones cell phone with a reasonable access fee instead of the $5 you have to pay on Verizon and then some and you don't even get mobile web. If anything it would be nice to have better more available virtual words that are more usable."
Of course, isn't that pretty much the promise (or threat?) of OpenSocial plus the social graph API? (Apropos, check out Rafe Needleman's interview with Google's David Glazer on the future of OpenSocial.)
- prev
- 1
- next
