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.
MySpace will adopt the Open Social API standard. Will Facebook? Will they? huuummmm?
Facebook will adopt the Open Social API the moment that the Google Book Scanning project finally joins the Open Content Alliance.
So, chop chop, Google. Join OCA and demonstrate by example your leadership in open initiatives. If you do not, this social play will pretty much reek to high heaven.
Here is a one minute video with MySpace & Google CEOs shortly after completing negotiations.
http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/01/exclusive-google-ceo-and-myspace-ceo-on-video/
The atmosphere and dress are very casual – it seems the tech world has resisted the formalities in dress code that plaque the brick and mortar business world for decades.
I asked on http://news.myspace.com/technology/google/item/11456171 how much Google paid — but I expect it will remain an “undisclosed amount”.
Also, some of the first privacy issues are being addressed at http://www.sixapart.com/about/news/2007/11/opensocial_kill.html — I just posted there and in case my comment isn’t “approved” there I guess I could always post it somewhere else instead (hmm — perhaps here?)
It’s really funny how all of a sudden “search” seems to be no longer about link algorithms — who would have thunk it?
;D nmw
I think its fair to say that Facebook are sprinting ahead only in terms of media “buzz”. Audience-wise the leaders (still be some distance lets remember) are MySpace.
hello,
How can I do now to access to “Myspace” site where i used to share some sociual networks!…
Thanks for help!
TiTou
Its not going to work. The people who use these sites don’t care about what goes on in the background. If their mates are there, thats where they’ll be. Facebook has got all the marketing hypeat the mo, its in the public conscious more than the others so therefore it is winning.
The real question is, what technology is going to replace social engineering?
It appears that my posts revealing some problematical issues around this open and/or social undertaking Google is trying to get support for are not appreciated at some websites (some of which are Google’s “partners”.
In SHARP CONTRAST to the censorship occurring at the websites listed below, I wish to recommend what I feel is a very succinct and clear summarization of some of the controversial issues raised be Google’s Alliance experiment at Jeremiah Owyang’s Web-Strategist.COM:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/11/02/explaining-opensocial-to-your-executives
Here are a couple comments that are apparently too controversial to post (typos are included for the sake of “authenticity” ;):
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@ SixApart.COM (www.sixapart.com/about/news/2007/11/opensocial_kill.html)
I searched for the “bianca” profile on tudiabetes.com
I found this: http://tudiabetes.com/profile/chispo95
It seems different than in Mr. Andreessen’s screencast (linked to in the article above), but that is not the primary issue.
Will opensocial allow applications to share bianca’s personal health/medical information across the web? Would it be possible to build applications that market new medications and/or treatments to bianca (and/or other tudiabetes members?).
How would this be different than the “Ads by Google” application already running at that website? Would more data be mined? Or would data be more protected than with Google’s “traditional” advertising programs?
This raises many controversial issues and questions that (AFAIK) have not yet been addressed by any of Google’s partners — or have you considered any of these problems (such as personal privacy)?
This will be interesting to watch, as the story unfolds….
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@ TechCrunch.COM (www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/02/google-opens-opensocial-site-and-orkut-support/#comments)
Dan Serfaty mentioned that he has competitors in Moscow (Russia), and that he is concerned about finding an international lawyer.
Would it be possible for Viadeo competitors to contact the same lawyer?
Would such open networking be good or bad?
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@ ReadWriteWeb.COM (www.readwriteweb.com/archives/opensocial_three_big_concerns.php)
how — technologically speaking — will this work in order to share personal profile data and/or applications between, say: match.com and dontdatehimgirl.com ?
As a programmer and an exhausted social networker, I’m very excited about starting to hook the different applications together. The privacy concerns about social networking certainly could get aggravated … we’ll see how companies and users balance connections with privacy.
And as a library/information science student, I second JG’s comment about Google and the Open Content Alliance. Do it, Google! Share!
google and myspace together??? Incredible…
Really we are in a new world.
http://bhopu.com/2007/11/05/Google-hits-back-with-MySpace
Facebook is certainly overambitious to break into an imploding web advertising market already bloated with AdWords and Yahoo!
the success of this could the one to break the camel’s back
A new virus “win32.Polish.Hax.h” originating from My Space adds banners are infecting computers worldwide. If you have logged into your account since Feb 13 2008 you may be infected. Please do a search for the fallowing file types. *.dll & *.xml. If you find any files on your computer with either of those extension please remove them to prevent spreading the virus further.
Thx.