OpenSocial Partners

A lot of activity is being seen in the Social Network scene with Bebo launching it's own platform on the lines of Facebook and LinkedIn & Friendster also launching their platforms last week. It seems like most of the Social Networks are keen on having their own platforms up and running rather than relying only on Google's OpenSocial - which might be a pretty smart thing to do.

Anyways here is a list of all OpenSocial partners:

Bebo - Very popular Social Network in Europe especially the UK.

Engage - A dating centric Social Networking website.

Friendster - Very popular in South East Asia.

Hi5 - A social network which sees global usage with no particular country dominating demographics.

Hyves - Extrememly popular in the Netherlands

imeem - A popular Social Media service site.

LinkedIn - The most popular Professional Social Networking site. These guys recently launched their own platform and opened it for 3rd party developers.

NetModular - Social Networking + Blogging platform.

mixi - A very popular social networking site in Japan.

MySpace - One of the largest if not THE largest Social Networking site in the world.

Ning - An online platform for users to create their own social networks.

Oracle - One of the major companies developing database management systems and tools for database development.

Plaxo - Online address book service.

Salesforce - Salesforce.com is an on-demand CRM solution vendor. They have something called AppExchange which is a way for external developers to create add-on applications that will link into the main Salesforce.com system.

Six Apart - Creators of Movable Type, Typepad, Vox and former owners of LiveJournal.

Tianji - Chinese Professional Networking site

Viadeo - Another professional social networking site.

Xing - Yet another professional social networking site. Majority of users are Germans.

Plaxo and Ning released OpenSocial support within the first day of the launch, with Plaxo adding OpenSocial support to its Pulse feature and Ning adding basic OpenSocial support.

Developers who had already built applications implementing the APIs upon launch include Flixster, FotoFlexer, iLike, RockYou, Slide, Theikos, and VirtualTourist. We'll have details about all these apps soon.

Google Profile - A link in the OpenSocial chain?

Presenting the GProfile...



Google Profiles will be integrated in most Google services so you have a coherent identity and a simple way to manage your contacts.

Until now, you could create profiles in Blogger, orkut, Google Groups, Google Co-op and all of them could contain different information. You could also add photos in Gmail, Google Talk and orkut, so the situation started to become confusing.

"A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products — it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you're all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you'd like."

Profiles are public and contain basic information about yourself: a nickname (the real name is displayed only to your contacts), your occupation, your location, a list of links, a photo and a short description. They are embedded as iframes in pages that showcase user-generated content (personalized maps, shared bookmarks).

These profiles could be the perfect host of ones activity stream and thats where I see the OpenSocial connection. Your public activities could become part of your profile...

Via: Google System

Facebook F8 vs Google OpenSocial

The Facebook F8 platform pretty much revolutionised the face of Social Networking. Opening up ones architecture for other parties required great courage and Facebook were able to successfully pull it off.

Growing valuation and massive increase in usage meant that Google had to respond. Orkut was and is still hardly used in the United States. It's not too popular with the Europeans either. Google knew that simply opening up their social network to 3rd party developers wouldn't be the best of options.

So what...?

They decided to go one step further and decided to come up with a system which would seamlessly fit into a lot of other social networks and together all of them would be able to beat Facebook with Google being the adhesive binding them all.

But will they be able to succeed?

3 reasons OpenSocial might be able to beat Facebook?

1) Developers might not need to make 10 or 15 different applications based on the API's of various different Social Networks. This is the prime weapon.

2) Streaming data out of the system - as compared to only feeding in the content. Allowing 3rd party applications a medium where they really stand to benefit in terms of traffic, usage and the ability to impart a better feel of personalization. Perhaps allowing inter-connectivity between Social Networks.
For eg: My flixster account is connected to all the Social Networks which I am on - and not limited to just one social network. If I write a film review on a movie on my Orkut Flixster app - all my MySpace friends get alerted about it too.

A lot of users might have accounts in multiple social networks - and many are pretty active in at least 2-3 of them. Especially when it comes to niche social networks.

3) Language. Facebook is highly limited to an English speaking audience currently and this is where the OpenSocial can really WIN big. Having a set of APIs where the back-end of an application works efficiently and the front-end serving up different languages depending on nationality, country and language spoken.

3 reasons Facebook might still have the last laugh?

1) Facebook has the most monetisable traffic - the US traffic. It's not to bad in the European countries either. Facebook Apps have increased pageviews and time spent on the spent to an incredible extent as compared to pre-F8 days.

2) They are the first movers. Few apps on Facebook have become the very reason why users log on to their Facebook accounts daily. Apps grow on you before they get virally spread and massively used and this has already happened on Facebook.

3) Facebook has Social Networking at it's core while Google has Search as it's primary focal point.