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."

Re:OpenSocial isn't going to save MySpace.

[DragonWriter]

First, let's define the problem: Facebook is winning the social network wars.

That's not the problem, IMO, that Google is trying to address with OpenSocial. It may be the problem that MySpace is trying to address with its participation in OpenSocial.

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.

Why? Google isn't even a serious player in that area (Orkut is trivial compared to any of the big networks). Insofar as Google is interested in social networking at all, it seems to be mostly interested in nontraditional applications (i.e., social networking within enterprises), where any technology lead an existing player has might be important, but the dominance of its existing network in the traditional social networking market is less significant.

Of course, if OpenSocial, once the rest of it (the server-side bits) is released, allows easy federation, the entire idea of a massive single-site based network and the entire traditional social networking model may become passe, anyhow. And, frankly, if OpenSocial doesn't do that, I suspect someone else will.

Re:OpenSocial isn't going to save MySpace.

[s1d]

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]