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Google's partners were reportedly happy with this collaborative initiative as,
in one stroke, they got access to a big medium through which to reach out to new
markets and users. In return, Google could generate huge profits by advertising
on its partners' sites.
According to Joe Kraus, director of product management, Google, the partners
participating in OpenSocial offered a combined audience of over 100 million
people.
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Some analysts opined that OpenSocial was a brilliant
idea of monetizing the applications developed by third-party developers.
Some analysts felt that the new platform provided Google with the
opportunity to bolster its online ad business further by entering the
huge new market for social networking-oriented advertising.
However, some analysts felt that OpenSocial was a big disappointment,
that it was more of hype than anything else. Dismissing OpenSocial as
'boring' and a 'full blown disappointment', Tim O'Reilly, head of
O'Reilly Media, wrote, "If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to
port their applications more easily from one social network to another,
that's a big win for the developer as they get to shop their application
to users of every participating social network... But it provides little
incremental value to the user [who is] the real target. We do not want
to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want
applications that can use data from multiple social networks."3
Some of them also said that Google in its pursuit to become the No.1
destination for everything on the web, was tarnishing its original image
by running after everything and was at the risk of losing direction. The
other questions that analysts asked were how Google would monetize its
ads, and the participation criteria for third-party developers.
Interestingly, on October 24, 2007, Microsoft bought a 1.6 percent stake
in Facebook (which was valued at US$ 15 billion) for a whopping US$ 240
million.4 Consequently, Microsoft
got an edge over Google in advertising on Facebook's website, which was
rated second in the world in terms of page views for the month of
September 2007.
Analysts felt that with the launch of OpenSocial, the battle for web
domination between Microsoft and Google had got fiercer. And this time
around, Microsoft along with Facebook were pitch-forked against Google
and its partners.
Analysts said that social netwoking sites had emerged as a global
phenomenon and no company could afford to ignore them altogether. As
such, they did not expect the competition to be limited to Google and
Facebook.
They expected more Internet software companies to eventually jump on the
bandwagon. Analyst Ray Valdes of IT research and advisory company
Gartner Inc., said, "This is really round one of a protracted
competition that's not just between Google and Facebook, but pretty much
every web giant that owns some data about people on the Web... This is
an evolving multi-way, multi-faceted competition that's going to
characterize the next five years."5
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3] "Barclays India Launches Mobile Banking Operations," www.economictimes.indiatimes.com, March 4, 2008.
4] Harish Dhawan, "Hello Money - New Mobile Banking Service by Barclays India," www.topnews.in, March 4, 2008.
5] Anita Bhoir, "'India is a Key Market`," www.business-standard.com, March 4, 2008. |
