November 05, 2007

New apps already coming for Google's new OpenSocial

Third-party developers quick off the mark

By Heather Havenstein

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After MySpace and Google last week sent shockwaves through the Web 2.0 world – and a shot across the bow of current social networking darling Facebook - third-party developers have already started announcing plans to build applications using their jointly developed social network APIs.

MySpace and Google announced on Thursday that they had joined forces to create a set of APIs that can be used by third parties to create social applications on a variety of sites.

The next day, Plaxo unveiled new dynamic profiles that support Google's new OpenSocial APIs. Users of Plaxo's Pulse social network can now create distinct professional and personal profiles that include photos, contact information and privacy settings. Any applications written to the Google OpenSocial APIs can be embedded in the profiles, Plaxo said.

The impetus behind OpenSocial, Google said, was to allow developers to learn one API and then be able to write a social application for any OpenSocial partner site. "And because it's built on web standards like HTML and JavaScript, developers don't have to learn a custom programming language," noted Amar Gandhi and Peter Chane, group product managers at Google in a blog post.

Google estimates that more than 200 million users of the websites that have committed to OpenSocial, like MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn, will have access to these applications.

"Perhaps most interestingly, we will see social capabilities move into new contexts," the two noted in the blog. "OpenSocial will also work in non-traditional social contexts, such as on Salesforce.com and Oracle. With a common set of APIs, it will be even easier to extend social functionality. Beyond the many fun and entertaining social applications we already have seen, we think we'll see a number of social applications emerge in business contexts."

Marc Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape (later acquired by AOL in 1998), blogged that OpenSocial dispels the common assumption held by some that Facebook has established unquestionable dominance in the social networking world. He noted that while many people assumed in the mid-1990s that AOL owned the web because it had amassed tends of millions of users, it lost its dominance when broadband became widely available and people no longer needed a dial-up ISP.

"I am not predicting the death of Facebook," Andreesen blogged. "I think the Facebook people are brilliant and are going to do very well over the next several years. But the idea that you hear from time to time that 'all the users are on Facebook' and 'the game is over; the Facebook platform has won' is silly, as you can see every time you use a website that doesn't end in aol.com."

Andreessen, of course, founded Ning, a company that allows users to build their own social networks and is an OpenSocial partner. Ning plans to make OpenSocial applications available to all of its 113,000 social networks later this year or early next spring, the company said. OpenSocial applications will run inside social networks across Ning, the company said.

"All of the partners finalising and releasing all of the initial OpenSocial container and application implementations, of course," Andreessen noted in his blog. Everyone can just smell the opportunity, and people are going to drive to ship as quickly as possible."

Now read:

Feature: Will Facebook join Google's OpenSocial?

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