Tonight, a small group of entrepreneurs, technologists, executives, bloggers, press, and professional campfire tenders gathered in Mountain View below the official Google tyrannosaurus rex and formally launched Open Social into the world.
As I write this, Google is about half an hour away from officially putting the Open Social spec and code on the Internet for general consumption. At that same time, the video from the launch event should be going live. Keep hitting this currently nonworking link until you get satisfaction! [Correction -- the official site is up at that location! Also, here's the video of the launch event with all the demos.]
So how'd it go?
Great! In addition to speakers from Google, the launch event included demos from a wide swath of the "coalition of the willing" assembled in support of Open Social -- including the newest member and Open Social supporter, MySpace.
All of the demos were -- to my knowledge -- live running code. And they worked.
The T rex not only did not eat us, but did not fall over on us.
They had smores.
What's not to like?
Read more at Marc Andreessen's blog.
My company, Ning, is participating in this week's launch of a new open web API called Open Social, which is being spearheaded by Google and joined by a wide range of partners including Google's own Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, iLike, Flixster, RockYou, and Slide.
In a nutshell, Open Social is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:
* "Containers" -- social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and...
* "Apps" -- applications that want to be embedded within containers -- for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.
This is the exact same concept as the Facebook platform, with two huge differences:
* With the Facebook platform, only Facebook itself can be a "container" -- "apps" can only run within Facebook itself. In contrast, with Open Social, any social network can be an Open Social container and allow Open Social apps to run within it.
* With the Facebook platform, app developers build to Facebook-proprietary languages and APIs such as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) -- those languages and APIs don't work anywhere other than Facebook -- and then the apps can only run within Facebook. In contrast, with Open Social, app developers can build to standard HTML and Javascript, and their apps can then run in any Open Social container.
If you recall how I previously described the Facebook platform as "a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry", you'll understand why I think Open Social is the next big leap forward!
Open Social takes the Facebook platform concept and provides an open standard approach that can be used by the entire web. Open Social is an open way for everyone to do what Facebook has done...
...including Facebook itself, potentially -- more on that below.
Read more at Marc Andreessen's blog.
As I've previously discussed, my new company Ning exists to give everyone the ability to create your own social network for anything -- in less than two minutes, for free -- with the ability to customize your network any way you want.
Today we passed 100,000 social networks on Ning.
This chart shows the number of social networks on Ning since we rolled out the current version of our service earlier this year:
(Credit:
Marc Andreessen/Ning)
As you can see, 70,000 networks have been created in the last seven months alone!
What does it mean to have 100,000 social networks?
As you might expect, the 100,000 networks on Ning follow a power law curve for any metric you choose to apply: number of members, say, or number of page views.
Internally we think of the networks on Ning as falling into three buckets:
* Big networks -- the top, say, 200 networks at any point in time that each have a large number of members.
* Long tail networks -- smaller networks with, by definition, more than 1 member but fewer members than the big networks -- could be dozens, hundreds, or thousands of members.
* Throwaway networks -- networks that were created, maybe have a few members, but are not being used.
Read more at Marc Andreessen's blog.
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