

Could have Facebook stopped OpenSocial by allowing Google to invest? - shayan

I don't personally think they had the power to stop Google, and I don't think Google would have done it anyways.  But if they did have a chance, I really think they should have tried in order to get bigger faster and keep their walled garden as long as they could.&#60;p&#62;That being said, I am happy that OpenSocial is not stopped, its definitely better for everyone.
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nickb
Had they allowed Google to invest, Google would probably not have proceed to
support OpenSocial so quickly. They would have protected their investment into
FB. Don't be fooled by Google's PR.. they do play tough. If you want to see
how Google operates similarly to how MS operates, go back and do some googling
on how they threatened StumbleUpon guys. They basically told them that unless
they allow them to buy them (instead of eBay), they will destroy them by
adding StumbleUpon-like features to their toolbar.

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shayan
Thats interesting about stumbleUpon, but what happened when they eventually
got bought out with eBay? what was Google's move?

But I do agree, if Google had invested in FB they would have probably not
pushed for OpenSocial so aggressively and so quickly. But I think they would
have eventually done it, meaning they would not have been stopped by FB.

I think there is a lot more to get out of OpenSocial. If they can reach out to
the whole web instead of one network they can probably do a lot more and
target a lot more people. As they said it themselves, they look at the web as
a platform instead of one site on it as the only platform.

So far with OpenSocial they have Myspace, Bebo, Orkut, Friendster, SixApart
and +++ which is almost = to the web. This is not a bad deal compared to one
site that is mostly about what it could be in the future rather than what it
is actually right now (which is not much compared to Myspace, and definitely
nothing close to all these sites combined.)

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senthil
facebook in last 3 years gone from a milion dollar valuation to 15 billion.

Google has its grudge against Facebook, microsoft has invested and created a
high valuation and facebook potentially launching a ad service with better
user preference knowledge than its old adsense platform

facebook is growing and has a mindshare of top 16-30 year olds, the youth whom
every advertiser targets.

Facebook app development is not easy, no ajax, fancy UI for now, but as a
innovator and a great developers dveloping facebook and facebook apps they can
overcome those.

if google had to team with up everybody to compete against facebook and
facebook application developers then facebook has been able to achieve what it
intended to.

but over time expect opensocial to add other API besides current widgetting
capabilities as they dont want to look like a cheap imitation.

also I suspect google would be writing some intermediate code for interfacing
developer apps with other opensocial sites.

most of this communication would be via REST and JSON

for developers and development companies like ours we would put our bets on
apps/sites which give us better revenues and development oppurtunities. we
would continue with facebook apps and may port some to opensocial if demand
exists

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shayan
here is an interesting video about the politics behind Google's OpenSocial
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=76383>

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shayan
Further, many Facebook applications are not able to take advantage form the
Facebook platform now. The platform paid off well for the early adopters and
also for the most popular apps, but the majority of applications on Facebook
are not seeing much return from the site. Whereas, through OpenSocial they are
now able to reach out to a much larger audience, that is also a lot more
diversified with a lot more itnerests.

On top of all these it is a lot easier to develop for OpenSocial as it is for
Facebook, since you can merely use HTML and Javascript to do so, instead of
learning the FBML (facebook markup language). Although it should be noted that
in order for a developer to do more customized stuff, they will need to work
with the APIs of those sites that have one, this way they can take total
advantage of the underlying websites.

