Battle Lines Being Drawn Over OpenSocial

SkiifGeek writes "Microsoft employees have already openly criticized Google's OpenSocial initiative (recently discussed here), and now there's news that one of the first OpenSocial applications, emote by Plaxo, was hacked within 45 minutes of appearing on the Net (it was subsequently pulled while Plaxo looked into fixing the holes). Although coding errors can happen to anyone, leaving evidence of lax programming discipline when all it takes to view your code is 'View Source' is poor form. It seems that the battle lines have been drawn between Microsoft and Google through their social networking proxies, with Facebook getting ready to fire the next salvo in the social networking battle."

OpenSocial isn't going to save MySpace.

First, let's define the problem: Facebook is winning the social network wars. Even though Myspace has a trillion users, it is passe and Facebook is The New Thing. As more people join Facebook, switching costs get lower, leading to a cascade effect. In terms of the diffusion of innovations curve, Facebook is now being heavily adopted by the "Early Majority", indicating they've got a good one or two years left of substantial growth. In Google's eyes, this is a major problem because it can't really afford to "lose" at social networks for the next two years.

The OpenSocial value proposition goes something like this: Adopt opensocial, push your data into more places, and everyone wins. Consumers get their information needs answered in more places, and companies get their footprint in more places. And more or less, I think more relevant social services in more places is a win, but not in the Facebook-killing way.

To put it bluntly, OpenSocial isn't an anything "killer." And OpenSocial isn't going to save Myspace.

Re:OpenSocial isn't going to save MySpace.

Hmm. This is beyond Facebook vs Myspace.
All Facebook fanboys seem to forget that its only big in US, and there too not the biggest yet (may get there, but who's seen the future!). For people in India, where I'm from, Orkut is the default social network. Everybody's there. 10 year old kids, 60 year old grand dads, but not to forget, India's teeming youth. Almost everyone from my school, university, work etc. Everyone! OpenSocial wasn't built to save Myspace. It was built to serve as a common API to developers to develop apps for all social network.
Apps on Facebook are very cool, but with the barrage of apps which have come up, it has totally screwed up their UI. It takes a newcomer a little while to find his bearings there. And even for experienced users, the app spam is becoming too much. Then you have profiles where a user has added dozens of apps, making it pretty much like a highly jumbled up myspace page, though without the graphic stuff.
Facebook has been going great guns so far, but they now have a very credible opponent. And it shall make for very interesting following.
As a passing note, check out this community for opensocial developers/users.
http://www.opensocializr.com/ [opensocializr.com]

OpenSocial is fixing a solved problem!

Chromatic points out that the whole problem addressed by Ope\ nSocial's API has already been solved [oreillynet.com]:

Over the weekend I encountered a dusty old RFC written in 1982 that might solve this persnickety interoperability problem. Jon Posten's Social Messaging Transport Protocol describes a system that relies on the combination of your unique identifier (username) on a social networking site with a unique identifier (domain name) for such site to produce an Internet-wide addressible identifier uniquely identifying, well, you. Given this unique identifier, any conformant messaging system can use this Messaging protocol to send you, well, a message.

Honestly, I can't understand why Google et al. would ignore this work. If only there were some way of contacting them...

I hope this isn't taken seriously...

Who the hell really cares what way the social net wars go? Maybe if you're an active developer I can see it but otherwise it's like arguing over superman versus batman.

This kind of bickering will hopefully turn some people against social networks and get some kids back to doing their own pages again instead of using lame ass templates.

Re:I hope this isn't taken seriously...

Are you fscking kidding me? Maybe the best thing about Facebook is that it gives the user zero control over their profile's HTML.

Unless you're a kick-ass programmer _and_ kick-ass designer, the probability that you can produce anything that looks better than Facebook's "lame ass templates" is 1/aleph one.

I'm so glad

...that I have nothing to do with the universe of social sites and such. From the sound of it all, I am missing nothing at all, eccept an opportunity to waste precious time.

Oh, yeah, slashdot....

First OpenSocial App made by retard. So what?

So the first OpenSocial app that someone rushed out the door ASAP to be the first, as opposed to it being a professional tech demo, was made by somebody stupid when it comes to security (aka 99% of developers). So what?

Ya'all know its a fad, right?

The generation of youngsters that is pushing these Social Networks into prominence have the attention span of a crack-addled butterfly. They will flit about and land on the next thing soon enough, and then, after they are done with it, the corporations will notice and will invest in it a couple of years after its lost its prominence. Ask a teen. Any teen.

It's just more lock in

I don't understand why any tech-savvy early adopter would be dying to lock into a platform. The companies are just as hungry for users to use their platform. I'm guessing it's all to lock in ad-revenue or mind-share or some other sinister corporate plan. It's too bad that the Internet used to be about open-communication. RFC's people! RFC's!! (I'm a big fan of the mention another poster made to the "dusty old RFC" that already solved this problem back in the 80's).

Social networking is dangerous to personal security. It's more about who you know, and sometimes we get involved with scrupulous parties that are not in-favor with the current dominant social circles. How long until creditors, government agencies, and employers exploit social networks online?

If one wishes to maintain a public network and a private one, that's there prerogative and is certainly maintainable. However, imagine a hypothetical situation where someone in that network gets flagged as a bad-apple by some institution. Would it be possible that policies at said institution may flag you as a bad-apple by association?

Funniest Comment of the Year

// TODO: no error checking - were bold // TODO: figure out why this is necessary???

I nominate thoat for funniest comment by a "programmer" of the year.

New John Woo Movie with

Advertisers battling to the death?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/02/ok-heres-at-least-part-of-what-facebook-is-announcing-on-tuesday/ [techcrunch.com]

Looks like there's gonna be a Face-On/Face-Off...

Everything That Rises Must Converge*

Google releases open social without a RI for the server, promising one *any day now*. In the meantime, they're also proposing all sorts of new data standards and pushing a creaky technology to the limit.

Oh, and they're easy to hack.

Of who am I reminded?

(*Apologies to Flannery O'Connor.)

Hmmm, uhhh....

But is there any real profit to be in social networks? I mean it's nice to have a basic 'conduit' to meet up with people online, but when I was a teenager, that was what IRC was for. For others it's Ventrilo or Steam Community. In the end, I see it as an application layer set atop the inherent power of the Internet, which is to connect random people with little effort (little effort in as much as without physical travel and what not for said random people), thus it doesn't give anything new in itself rather than a nicer 'wrapper' to access the same features of the Internet that have existed in one form or another. Be it USEnet, IRC, mailing lists, and what not.

This is ridiculous

I've had it. I'm completely sick of hearing about companies throwing good money away trying to build "cool" software that has no business model other than "become popular and then sell ads", and at the end of the day really accomplishes nothing more than marginally improving geeks' chances of getting laid. Have we learned nothing from the dotcom era? These companies are blinded by the promise of harnessing the hype rampant on sites like slashdot. Yes, they're idiots, but we're enabling them.

Google is absolutely expert at converting hype to ad revenue, but that's because they know when to stop throwing good money after bad and cut their losses when the hype fades. It may result in some cool apps, but don't think for a second that OpenSocial will "change everything", unless of course by "change everything" you really mean "make it easier to meet women without leaving the house".

'Social' meant meeting people in person...

...now with these 'social' networks, a kind might sit behind a computer all day and still be considered social.

It's a change with fundamental consequences for society...

Oh, the irony! The irony!

A certain large company from R*dm*nd is feuding with another company, and security has become an issue?

The X-Files writers could NEVER have dreamed that one up!

-jn-

Re:How, what where?

Google's got Orkut. MS... dunno. 5% of Facebook or something like that.