Chris DeWolfe and Eric Schimdt, along with Joe Kraus have gathered the press corps on very short notice to announce a relationship – one quickly finalized, no doubt – around OpenSocial. MySpace will adopt the Open Social API standard. Will Facebook? Will they? huuummmm? What with Facebook announcing its own challenge to AdWords coming next week, the timing is certainly fortuitous.
God, history just keep repeating itself, doesn’t it? The parallels with the history of search are eerie. Someone leads (Friendster/Alta Vista), then falters, others launch, and catch up, a market leader emerges (Yahoo/MySpace), then a new entrant sprints ahead (Google/Facebook), then the “old” leaders have to partner to respond.
What’s interesting is that the “old” partner in the case of social networking is Google. Will this be a leap ahead, a real threat to Facebook? Or will Facebook stay ahead?
I am on the the call now, but I can’t stay they whole time. The embargo was just lifted, so here’s the release, below.
On the Facebook issue:
“We are talking to everyone, we are not announcing further partnerships now, we anticipate more…”
But I’m guessing Facebook is not one of them….yet. Folks pushed on the call on this point, and the answers were not definitive – it’s clear that overtures have been made, but none have been taken.
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MYSPACE AND GOOGLE JOIN FORCES TO LAUNCH OPEN PLATFORM FOR SOCIAL APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
Collaboration on “OpenSocial” to Spark and Simplify Web Innovation
LOS ANGELES / MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—November 1, 2007—MySpace, the world’s largest social network, and Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced that they are joining forces to launch OpenSocial— a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web. The partnership spearheads an initiative to standardize and simplify the development of social applications. Today’s announcement underscores MySpace’s commitment to supporting standards that foster innovation in an increasingly social Web.
“Our partnership with Google allows developers to gain massive distribution without unnecessary specialized development for every platform,” said Chris DeWolfe, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of MySpace. “This is about helping the start-up spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network. We’re pleased to collaborate with Google to establish a landmark standard for social applications.”
As a founding member of OpenSocial, MySpace will provide critical user mass and platform guidance. The OpenSocial standards are designed to evolve through contribution from the open source community and as new features are developed by various partners. Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.
“As the most trafficked website in the country and the most popular social network in the world, MySpace is one of the leading forces in the global social Web,” said Dr. Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Executive Officer of Google. “We’re thrilled to grow our strategic relationship with MySpace by joining forces on this important initiative.”
“An as application developer, we’re excited to see MySpace adopting the OpenSocial standard for social application development,” said Joe Greenstein, CEO of Flixster. “Application developers have been working with MySpace for a long time—this takes what we can do together to a whole new level. The sheer scale of MySpace makes this extremely exciting for us.”
“We’re all citizens of a larger Web—no network is an island onto itself,” said Aber Whitcomb, CTO of MySpace. “We look forward to continuing to develop great technology with Google and all of the OpenSocial participants. It’s exciting that social networks are getting social with each other.”
The launch of OpenSocial is the first release of technical details for the forthcoming MySpace Platform. Starting tonight, developers can start writing applications for OpenSocial at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial which the MySpace Platform will support at launch.