It’s not what you know…
…It’s how many friends you have. Any self respecting Facebook user knows that, right?
And what’s better than collecting loads of friends? Collecting loads of social networks, that’s what.
In the wake of the Microsoft/Facebook story comes Google OpenSocial (launching this week) - a unified accessible interface to a whole collection of information from Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle. (Details from TechCrunch)
The idea being that Google ties all of this related infomation together, and allows developers to create widget style applications that work across multiple social networks, without having to learn a whole new markup language. (OpenSocial uses standard HTML and javascript, unlike the Facebook API).
It’s going to be interesting to see exactly what can be done with this tool - assuming that the host networks will have the final say as to what can and what can’t be built on their platform. More than 7000 Facebook applications have been built since Facebook opened it’s API. (Most of those applications are really silly.)
The fact that at least two of the OpenSocial host networks (SalesForce and LinkedIn) are veritable goldmines of enterprise worthy information should be of note to anyone working on Enterprise 2.0 solutions. (like um.. us!)
And in the middle of it all, Google controls all the data and the network (in a non-evil way, of course…)
This “Everyone Else vs Facebook” approach reminds me a bit of Microsoft’s catchup play for developers in the early 90’s with .NET - “It’s every other language vs Java”.
That one didn’t work out exactly as Microsoft had planned, but it wasn’t exactly a failure - .NET and Java are both alive and well. I suspect something similar will happen here. Assuming that OpenSocial has legs, it seems safe to assume that developers would much rather target multiple platforms than one.
Does this mean they are going to have to standardize (or at least consolidate) identity across multiple hosts? Now that would be really something…
Ben Tremblay said,
Wrote on January 23, 2008 @ 10:52 pm
I just sent an email to someone uhhh outside NA about the snag he and I have hit: he wants design details before discussing possible business models. He wants me to hand over IP (totaly value) before talking hypothetically (no cost). That, to me (quite sadly) means he doesn’t have his eye on the ball. A good coder with a real grasp of back-end stuff like load-levelling. (S3 to the rescue!), but … I wouldn’t want him in my infantry section.
“The idea being that Google ties all of this related infomation together, and allows developers to create widget style applications that work across multiple social networks, without having to learn a whole new markup language.”
With respect, I think you missed the MoJo.
I bored you with that intro cuz of something I used to try to jog his brain into gear: back when Infoseek was a real contender for default search engine (I got a t-shirt from them for some heavy-lifting beta-testing!) google had an idea. Nope, not the code. Nope, not just the business model. They had the sort of IP that can be transfered on a napkin or the back of an envelope. The sort of design concept that’s so painfully self-evident that most folk just nod and then ignore it.
The MoJo? Ranking. Show me someone with /any/ sense of what’s what who thinks PageRank is minor. In any way.
Of course implementation is heavy lifting.
Look at the number of companies who’ve implemented well and then stalled.
What’s ranking? No no, not technically … cognitively. Why does it do what it does? MoJo.
It orders our universe.
When folk don’t grok that, even after google’s success, I despair. Going on 5 years in stealth mode and I can’t connect with anybody who’s interested in more than cheese-flavoured fun.
Earlier this afternoon I tweated, “” … heh … twitters down for that scheduled maintenance.
Anywhoo, something like, “Semantic Web (of which I’ve been a supporter since before there was WWW) is futile. CPUs don’t produce and manipulate information, they work with data. Only human-type critters work with information. CPUs crunch data.”
“Cognitive ergonomics” was a big concept around the time SGML was being created. (Folk think that stuff falls from the sky?!) Now I use that phrase and, well, on twitter an A-list type asked what random phrase generator I’d gotten that from.
It’s an addled age.
But hey, money knows cuz money-men don’t take their eye off the ball: WordPress just got $29.5M in second round funding; a clear case in point. And InformNews just got $15M … and Granicus $10M … smart money is still flowing to IT.
I find myself wondering when young turks will do something smart with our new tools.
Is all the google bunch did: sat down and created a solution … /ranking/.
cheers
ben