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Information Technology News Google's OpenSocial may bring sun down on Facebook: analyst
Information Technology News Google's OpenSocial may bring sun down on Facebook: analyst | Google's OpenSocial may bring sun down on Facebook: analyst |
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| Written by Stan Beer | |
| Friday, 02 November 2007 | |
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“Facebook requires webapp builders to adhere to its proprietary APIs," says Bradshaw. "In contrast, OpenSocial is built using open standards like HTML and Javascript, and it also supports Adobe's Flash. As a result, widgets on Facebook will be a lot harder to deploy on other sites and vice-versa, while OpenSocial widgets should be relatively easy to deploy between sites." So the differentiator between FaceBook and OpenSocial is clear and presents a clear threat to the fastest growing social networking site on the market, says Bradshaw. "OpenSocial's appeal is straightforward: build for one OpenSocial compliant website and you can deploy in lots of other places too. It is a clear challenge to Facebook's appeal: build on me and get a chance to grab some of my high volume of traffic. “But is OpenSocial likely to work? We think it has a very good chance. Facebook may be one of the hottest properties on the web, but it is by no means the only popular social networking website, nor is its continued 'hot' status guaranteed. Indeed, widescale adoption of OpenSocial APIs by website owners and webapp developers will reduce Facebook's uniqueness to end users." As for Microsoft beating Google to the punch in getting a stake in Facebook, Bradshaw believes that Google was probably never interested in competing for a share of the site. "The timing has got the conspiracy theorists going, with the announcement coming so soon after Microsoft forged its alliance with, and took a minority stake in Facebook. Could this be a direct retaliation? “We think the converse - because Google had this rolling down the launch ramp, it was perhaps not as keen as Microsoft for an alliance with Facebook. "We are especially interested by the participation of salesfore.com and Oracle in OpenSocial. Clearly their interest is being piqued by the increasing cross-over between the consumer web and the business web. This is a growing trend, especially in business applications like CRM that have an affinity to social networking."
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