The War of Social Networks

Written by Ph@ntoM on November 3, 2007 – 9:00 am -

It has been a turbulent period for the social networking world recently as Google had just partnered with a few today’s premier online social networks such as MySpace, Hi5, Orkut (Google’s own social network), Friendster, Bebo, Ning and etc. to come out an API for social applications across multiple networks, namely OpenSocial. The aim of this move was claimed to be joint collaborations on cross platform social applications development that could be used on multiple social networking providers. On the other side, it seems to be intercepting Facebook as Facebook has been constantly developing, rolling out innovative social applications and mulling users all over the world.

From the list of alliances, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster were the big boys and has large crowds all over the world with MySpace ranking on top. Facebook is one of the most rapidly growing social networking site today. Established 3 years ago, it is now No.2 in the social networking world, after News Corp’s MySpace. Ranked second, Facebook’s massive audiences and never-ending advertising potential attracts the sight of the giants such as Microsoft and even Yahoo! Previously, Yahoo! offered to purchase Facebook but was rejected by it’s founder - Mark Zuckerberg. Earlier this week, Miscosoft partnered with Facebook to provide advertising solutions to the No. 2 social network. It shows that Microsoft has strong interest in Facebook’s potential market and thus acquired stakes of the company. This would be their initial step on stepping into Facebook as well upgrading the rivalry against Google.

Earlier, Google acknowleged that they had approached Facebook on inviting them to join the OpenSocial project, however Facebook denied the approach and claimed that they were even not briefed on the project. It seems that Google invited others on board before Facebook would eventually join. Though of that, Google was still optimistic that Facebook will join, but it is to be believed that with the background influence of Microsoft, it seems that it would take a little longer to make this happen. Google does not only wants to invite Facebook into OpenSocial, they even tried to use their Ad-Sense advertising arm to get into the potential advertising market of Facebook. With the presence of Microsoft, it could be a question mark on how it could be achieved. Well, we can see that the invisible war has been ignited between the giants and social networks. So, let’s see what will happen next…

Now, Let’s see what’s in OpenSocial:

One of the significant features would be the use of standard Javascript and HTML codes unlike Facebook using their own markup language. Well, the advantages of this approach would really benefit lots of developers as they could retain their skills and create widgets easily and rapidly. As a result, it provides maximum flexibility for developers. View some example screenshots here…