Google's OpenSocial Too Late To Be a Win? 82
DeeQ writes with a link to a post on News.com's social networking blog. Author Caroline McCarthy wonders if Google's OpenSocial initiative has missed its moment in the sun. It's been something like six weeks now since the search giant offered up its open-source social media initiative ... but where have been the usual swift victories? Moreover, OpenSocial isn't done yet, and it's not expected until sometime next year. In the meantime Facebook is capitalizing on Google's delay, and other networks are stepping in as well. "Kraus adds that some of the independent platform strategies would be necessary even if OpenSocial were finalized. One of them is LinkedIn's 'InApps,' which also aims to spread LinkedIn's data and influence outside the business-oriented social network through partnerships with other Web sites. 'OpenSocial so far is really about how developers embed their application into a social network,' Kraus explained. 'A good chunk of LinkedIn's APIs is about how LinkedIn extends their social-networking data into other sites.'"
social web sites (Score:4, Informative)
A couple months back I got a facebook account, and while it's more functional that the myspace page, the vast majority of the content I see there is silliness and spam. I find the applications and installation stuff a annoyance. It's also not very customizable appearance wise. Other than an occasional vacation photo from a friend I rarely see, there's not much there that helps me. I'm considering canceling that too.
What I'd really like is something like facebook that's pure communication function, and less gibberish and marketing. Actually, something like a web-based AOL could work -- email, chat rooms, IM, all built into one facebook-like web site. More elegant looking and customizable.
Is that what OpenSocial is? I have not tried it.
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Are you talking about Facebook as compared to MySpace? Because there are a few 18 year old supermodels who friended me just to chat about a week ago.
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Hi! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:social web sites (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:social web sites (Score:5, Informative)
And the "keep in touch" function isn't important for close friends: it's better for staying in touch with acquaintances and more distant friends, giving you a viable reason to drop a quick hello without the awkward "I know it's been years since we've chatted, but..." In the space between the deeply personal and the completely professional is a kind of sociability that is vital for many people's careers.
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a) I don't like their interface
b) I hate the idea that, on the open Internet, I am so disabled as to have my social network enabled by some corporation's single product
c) Their spying has gone over the top and I strongly dislike giving personal data to be used for advertising.
Re:social web sites (Score:4, Informative)
Why text someone, when it's an idiotic substitute for an email? But why email them, when it's a lame substitute for calling them on the phone? Why call them on the phone, when you could just talk to the person face to face? And why on earth would you want to talk to the person, when you could socialize using old fashioned grunts and gestures, which worked perfectly well for our chimp-like ancestors?
I guarantee that in a few years, some new technology will come along and people will use it to socialize. And there will be people saying, "Why would I want to use that newfangled technology to communicate with my friends, when I can use an old-fashioned social networking site?"
Hustler and Club (Score:1, Offtopic)
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Some people will say "I use it to keep in touch with people", but that's bullshit, because it's an idiotic substitu
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So on a tech site, yeah expect the majority to look down on social network sites, where the jock straps and cheerlea
Re:social web sites (Score:4, Interesting)
The third use is to keep in touch with bands; the flipside of the first use. You gotta be there, to get promoted to. MySpace is a pretty good way to stay on top of when/where your favorite local bands are playing.
Of course, once you start doing that, you also get to satisfy your ego and validate your existence with attention whoring. ;-)
There's not much hassle with maintaining/monitoring, though. MySpace has atrocious usability, but people tend to learn to adapt to even the worst interfaces. (Ever watch someone copy a file on MS Windows with cut/paste?)
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Why the hell is this modded insightful? Clearly the parent is talking out of their arse. I'm not massively into social networking site, but I do have a facebook account. Last week I went to a friend's birthday party, and now photos are up on facebook of that party. There are no better tools for this kind of thing. It's not about ego, or spamming, or anything like that, it's just about keeping in touch with friends and sharing stuff. I have spent, in my entire life, about 1/2 an hour "getting, maintain
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The trick is to figure out what the next one will be and make some good $$$$ off of it.
Re:social web sites (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing we know for sure is that the people who use the social networks are not the kind of people who are afraid to change. No matter how successful Facebook has become by the time Google gets its act together, if Google comes up with some social networking tool that is really well-designed, fun and cool, and it isn't too obnoxious in the way it uses advertising and corporate boosterism, people will flock to it, leaving Facebook in the dust.
Unfortunately for Facebook (or more precisely - to whoever buys Facebook) the type of people who have made them successful are not the type of people who are going to stay with them out of loyalty if their needs aren't being met.
Call it a "fad" if you want to, but it's a matter of "Live by the Free Market, die by the Free Market." Ultimately, these outfits' need for continual growth, and growth in the rate of growth, is what's going to kill them the same way it's killing the credit/banking business. They based their very survival on the notion that everything (prices, demand, incomes, home values, etc etc) will just trend upward forever, and they leveraged themselves to an amazing extent based on this very flimsy - nay, illogical - notion. And the ugly result of this orgy of greed has barely begun. People tend to forget what happens to the fattest hogs.
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Unfortunately for Facebook (or more precisely - to whoever buys Facebook) the type of people who have made them successful are not the type of people who are going to stay with them out of loyalty if their needs aren't being met.
I'm not sure what evidence this is based on? On the contrary, to some degree people are locked in, in that you need an account to access all your friends
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Wait a minute... did you...? I'm sorry (*cough*).
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Wait a minute... did you...? I'm sorry (*cough*).
Not me, but people do buy. I don't think there are any official figures, but http://news.livejournal.com/100876.html [livejournal.com] suggests that the number of permanent accounts sold last time has a lower bound of 1040.
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Open Social means universal API format (Score:1)
We may be developing what you want... (Score:2)
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Good luck! It is impossible to delete a facebook account. [wikipedia.org]
From the link:
The website only gives users the option of "deactivating." However, once an account has been deactivated, all the personal information of users remain on Facebook's servers in case in the future they wish to reactivate. The website provides no means for users to permanently delete their account.
This, to me, is reason enough to not us
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Needs to find its niche (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook, which started out as something for college students, is still generally focused on that particular market. Moreover, unlike MySpace, it's rather strictly controlled; you can really only search for friends in your particular networks. Plus, the inclusion (and encouragement) of user-created applications gives FaceBook a level of functionality that other networking sites lack.
LinkedIn is specifically targeted for professional, rather than social, networking.
MySpace seems to be aiming itself more at media integration, organization/campaign building, musicians, that sort of thing. (IOW, more "commercial" than the other two, if that makes any sense.)
For it to work, OpenSocial has to find its focus--it needs something to separate it from the other social networking sites beyond merely being a Google project. If it doesn't, it's just going to go the way of Friendster--it'll be out there, but nobody will really be using it.
Re:Needs to find its niche (Score:4, Informative)
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But why would they want to? Why would Facebook want you to use MySpace apps? I think Facebook would prefer its users to be oblivious to the existence of myspace. Why would Facebook want to make the difference between myspace and itself negligible? It wouldn't. Otherwise, who would care about which social network you use? How is that attitude beneficial to a Social Network that's already one of the big players?
I think what
Re:Needs to find its niche (Score:4, Informative)
There will still be different niches, but I'll be able to manage each of my different "personalities" (if you will) from one place.
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For myself working in film and media -- Myspace is a great tool for networking. It's great for finding new writers, actors, editors, composers etc, locally and all over the world. It's a really great tool for this. In contrast, Facebook is totally worthless to me. I can't network on it if I c
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people will be switching for another couple years (Score:2, Interesting)
Thank their culture. (Score:2)
Not too late (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not too late (Score:4, Insightful)
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Worried about Google investors (Score:5, Interesting)
They do many things very well, but I don't see any of their major services from which you cannot switch to a competitor on a whim. Let's be honest : for 99% of searches, several other search engines will give you results that are at least as relevant or useful as Google's. Even if objectively you would find any google service to be slightly superior than its counterpart, there really is barely any friction from switching if you don't like their name anymore or if you feel like giving a chance to a competitor. They don't even have any notable "network effect" assets like eBay, Paypal, Facebook, Amazon Marketplace and recommendations, the IMDB, etc.
Re:Worried about Google investors (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Worried about Google investors (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd argue that most products and services are not natural monopolies; otherwise, capitalism would not work and no country would use it. Microsoft's position is great if you happen to be Bill Gates, but it's a drag on everybody else in every other industry (why do people outside slashdot fail to recognize that?)
Google better thank their lucky stars there's no search lock-in, because otherwise google could never have displaced altavista, yahoo, microsoft, and everybody else who came along before google. At the same time, google better stay on its toes.
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I don't believe that for a second (Bell Labs, for example? Toyota, Lockheed, Merck, IBM, Philips, Sony, Xerox...?) but wouldn't it be sad if it were true? They should come over here and develop new drugs; I'll be glad to cover making Web 2.0 apps that never get out of beta.
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Remember, like television, their customer isn't you, it's the advertiser.
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Their search products such as Image Search, Froogle, News, etc... all did the same thing... clean UI, easy to use, good results.
For their applications, I think people moved to Gmail because again, the clean UI, they
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Dude, who was your ISP then? And what freemail services were these? I remember those days well. All the ISPs I'd tried had a 6 - 10 MB limit. Freemail providers were dropping rapidly; yahoo had dropped new accounts from 6 to 4 MB, and hotmail was down to a pitiful 2 MB. At the time, the amount of space gmail was offering was unbelievable. No one else was doing anything like it, and it took more than a year for others like yahoo to catch up
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Ads are annoying at best.
Stock is speculative.
Google's stock will start to fall (Google has been remarkably overpriced for a remarkably long time), investors will want to maximize profits, and they will cash out. Unless people invested in a
Once this happens, Google will either fail spectacularly, or the company will start acting like, I don't know, a company.
Suddenly employees won't be getting free massages, d
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Google is a great company filled with brilliant people like maybe no company has ever been.
You overstate their "brilliance". It is mostly exclusivity and secrecy that makes it look like there's openness that is not there.
But there's something I never understood about it : how do they actually plan to lock in their position ?
Multiple class shares. You put money in, you get no decision out. One opinion, one voice, one leader. Otherwise people would be able to steer Google away from bad moves such as China.
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In addition to sloppy's excellent points,
1) Google counts on the same psychological effect that the entire advertising industry counts on to keep people consuming its product: branding. The average human beings' tendency is to stick with what is familiar. They were able to provide a search engine service (at the time) markedly superior to what was available (Yahoo, Altavista, & Hotbot), so now people go to them for searches, rather than some place else. Its the same with McDonald's, Charmin, and S
poor API (Score:2)
If they created a well thought out API it would get much more traction.
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Of course it isn't too late (Score:2, Insightful)
As someone who has used facebook a bit, I can say it sucks! There are tons of opportunties to make something better (or worse, depending on your point of view), and Google is one company trying to do so.
Was Google too late when it started its search engine years after the first engines? Was gmail too late because Rocketmail was first? Was wikipedia too late, because Brittanica was already there? For that matter, was Facebook too late, because email had already existed for decades?
If a tool co
"Nothing's over to we say it's over" (Score:2)
Where was Facebook three years ago? Nowhere, that's where! The next social networking site will work different, it will be called... well, when I finish it I'll tell ya.
Yeah... as always (Score:2)
Yeah, I guess time has always counted, like with IBM and the personal computers, or MS Windows and the graphical operating systems, or iPod and the portable media players, or Google and search engines (yes, there was altavista, excite and yahoo before google) or Xbox and video game consoles or...
geez, you get the idea.
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Geocities called from 1995, they wanted their web sites back
Bias? (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's a big if. Perhaps they should stick a 121st CNET logo/reference somewhere on the page, since it's so easy to miss.
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Quote of the year (in hell) from the story... (Score:3, Informative)
Riff? Die on the vine?
Compare to Facebook's (Score:5, Informative)
Contrast that with OpenSocial. I recently wrote a white paper on it, which I wouldn't mind getting feedback on. It should make OpenSocial's strengths (and its significant weaknesses) pretty apparent:
A First Look at OpenSocial [concretewebsites.com]
Answering Questions About Google's Effort at Standardizing Social Network Widgets, and the Creation of Your First OpenSocial Widget .
Google is right on time (Score:2, Insightful)
LinkedIn doesn't need this. (Score:2)
I don't want my LinkedIn profile on other sites. All I'll get is spam.
LinkedIn has a problem with "LinkedIn Open Networkers", i.e. spammers, who just use LinkedIn to troll for contacts. Since LinkedIn doesn't have forums, they troll by using the "LinkedIn Answers" feature to ask bogus "questions". Much more of that and the question-answering system will be useless.
Swift victories? (Score:1)
What victories? (Score:2)
Huh? What swift victories? It took Google Search years to reach the top. Google Mail still isn't dominant, not even close, etc... etc... Googles only real victories are AdWords, Search, and Maps. Their other 'victories' come from buying existing lines of business (Blogger, YouTube) or from having no real competitors (Docs).
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OraleSocial (Score:1)
Never too late to introduce a new paradigm... (Score:2)
usual swift victories? (Score:2)