The social networking scene has turned into a war zone. If I were planning on starting a company today, I'd try to do something in an area that people don't pay much attention to, like Google did with search in 1998.
for me, it's not a war zone, it's a boxing match between Google and facebook. but Google was the heavyweight and facebook was young and arrogant. we all know waht happens next.
Facebook doesn't have to join up. It'll take a half day's work to make a wrapper you can throw on your OpenSocial app to make it work in Facebook. If that.
It's in Facebook's interest to keep people making apps that have some attachment to Facebook proper, though. If people aren't using FBML and FQL, there's no platform lockin. I assume Facebook's going to beef up their custom offerings so that people are at least forced to make a special version of their product just for Facebook.
I'm not sure if that's good for Facebook. Sure. some developers out of trying to get the best market share might develop a version for Facebook and one for OpenSocial, but some might stick with just OpenSocial and Facebook will loose. The benefits of third party apps on Facebook does not come from locking in developers. It comes from bringing features to Facebook so that users don't have a reason to switch.
One question: when is facebook joining?
My Answer: It will have to break the walls eventually as they have mentioned it before themselves. When I dont know but they will do it eventually.
Maybe when developers realize they can reach a much bigger market, a lot easier and faster with Opensocial compared to facebook, and they start developing a lot more products for them. Or maybe when Facebook creates its very own applications (their web-wide upcoming ad network is a sign of this) for OpenSocial.
Oh, sure, they've made a few half-assed attempts to make IE standards-compliant, sort of, but only after making many full-assed attempts to distort those standards to give Microsoft competitive advantages. I've heard that directly from folks working on the relevant teams over there. Microsoft cheerfully shows up at the standards meetings to make damn sure they screw up the APIs for everyone else. You know. Microsoft-style. Sorta like how DirectX was bugly compared to OpenGL. Or Win32 compared to Xnix. Or MFC compared to any sane object system (e.g. TurboPascal and TurboC). Or COM compared to CORBA. (I mean, you have to work hard to be worse than CORBA.) Microsoft has always been awful at making APIs, always always always, and I've decided over the years to credit this to malice rather than incompetence. Microsoft isn't incompetent, whatever else they might be. Burdened, yes; incompetent, no.
but at this point I think if there will be any standards it would be OpenSocial, i.e. Google, rather than Facebook with their platform. I dont think it will be that easy to pull off what Microsoft did, for anyone else, the web is open and no one can create a competitive advantage by setting standards anymore. There will be standards but only those that are open and not locked down by one site or company.
Wonder how Microsoft feels about this? Is that Facebook investment still worth as much as they paid for it? Looks like Google is consistently a few steps ahead of them whatever they do.
I don't think Microsoft paid the 240m$ just to have some shares in facebook. The most important thing Microsoft got out of the deal was the international advertising exclusivity on Facebook. And that could only go away if Facebook starts losing page views and eventually become irrelevant. Opensocial is probably a move forward and might eventually cause facebook to join and eventually break the walls, but it wont necessarily mean that facebook will lose the fight, they could still be a huge platform, maybe the biggest one (not considering OpenSocial, and looking at independent platforms, such as Myspace, Hi5 ...) and facebook could still be a popular destination for the years to come.
Think of MS "investment" into FB as an advance payment for their advertising deal. MS guarantees $150m/year to FB in revenue. MS is losing a lot of money on even that deal so the last thing they wanted was to allow Google to take that advertising avenue away from them.
