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On
November 1, 2007, one of the world's leading Internet software
companies, Google Inc. (Google) launched a social networking
platform in its effort to achieve a breakthrough in the fast
growing social networking space. OpenSocial was a set of common
application programming interfaces (APIs) partnering with social
networking companies such as Bebo, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5,
Hyves, imeem, mixi, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, Plaxo, Six Apart; and
business-related networking companies like LinkedIn, Tianji,
Salesforce.com, Viadeo, Oracle, and XING.
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Jeff Huber, senior vice president of engineering,
Google, said, "There's a lot of innovation that will be spurred simply
by creating a standard way for developers to run social applications in
more places... OpenSocial will unleash more powerful and pervasive
social capabilities for the web, empowering developers to build
far-reaching applications that users can enjoy regardless of the
websites, web applications, or social networks they use." The company
contended that OpenSocial would benefit the software developers,
websites, as well as users.
Some analysts viewed this as a defensive strategy and said that this was
the first time that Google had initiated something in a defensive mode
to outsmart Facebook, which was the fastest growing social networking
site with over 50 million users as of November 2007.
Analysts also noted that OpenSocial had been launched just a week after
Google had lost out to the world's leading software company, Microsoft,
Inc., in a bid to invest in Facebook and a week before Facebook had
launched its new online advertising system.
According to analysts, Google has taken a leaf out of Facebook's book in
developing OpenSocial which is run on the same lines but follows an open
system compared to Facebook's closed one. In early 2007, Facebook had
opened its services to outside software developers, which led to more
than 5,000 small programs being built by the end of October 2007 to run
on Facebook.
Some of these programs had since found favor with millions of Facebook
users. This had made Facebook the preferred platform for software
developers as they found the combination of social data and news feeds
helpful in distributing their software, analysts said.
OpenSocial with three APIs, shared a common social platform where
third-party developers developed social applications which helped their
users to access, share, and display their personal information and that
relating to friends and activities on the web without any hassles.
Google provided three JavaScript and Gdata APIs to access social
activities; a sandbox on Orkut.com and a sample code and a support group
on code.google.com to the third-party developers. In addition to this,
websites were provided access to a support forum to communicate with
Google and an OpenSocial enabling tool.
Some experts felt that the best thing about OpenSocial was that creating
applications was very easy in this platform as developers could use
normal javascript and html. In contrast, applications in Facebook had to
be developed using FBML and could not be used outside of Facebook.
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1] "Google's OpenSocial in Facebook
Challenge," www.dailytimes.com.pk, November 5, 2007.
2] Thomas Calburn, "Google Squares off Against
Facebook with OpenSocial," www.informationweek.com, October 31, 2007. |
