The “Gog and MaGoogle” War on Social Networking

The “Gog and MaGoogle” war on social networking has begun.

From marc.blog, October 30th, 2007.
‘OpenSocial details coming out’
 …”Well well well – the wars have begun. Just as Facebook announces SocialAds – Google moves up their launch date and announces (kind of)OpenSocial. Originally slated for Nov. 5th, Facebook’s attack on Google’s family jewels must (obviously) have prompted them to start to sneak details of OpenSocial – the APIs I was disclosed on in Sept. But now that Mr. Arrington and the NYTimes have disclosed it – I guess I can talk aboutit.”…see more

From techcrunch, (Mr. Arrington), October 30 2007
 Details Revealed: Google OpenSocial To Launch Thursday
..”Details emerged today on Google’s broad social networking ambitions, first reported here in late September, with a follow up earlier this week. The new project, called OpenSocial (URL will go live on Thursday), goes well beyond what we’ve previously reported. It is a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called “hosts”) that choose to participate.
  What they haven’t done is launch yet another social network platform. As more and more of these platforms launch, developers have difficult choices to make. There are costs associated with writing and maintaining applications for these social networks. Most developers will choose one or two platforms and ignore the rest, based on a simple cost/benefit analysis”… see more.

From ‘The New York Times’, October 31, 2007.
“Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook “…

“On Thursday, an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a
common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning.”…..”For now, however, Facebook has become the preferred platform for software developers”…..”By teaming with others, Google hopes to create a rival platform that could have broad appeal to developers. A person briefed on the plans said the sites in the alliance had a combined 100 million users, more than double the size of Facebook.”…
…”Google has not been able to establish itself as a force in social networking, and it clearly wants to. “One of the things to say, very clearly, is that social networks as a phenomenon are very real,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said in a recent interview. “If you are of a certain age, you sort of dismiss this as college kids or teenagers. But it is very real”… see more

From ‘Read/WriteWeb’, October 30, 2007.
…”What this means”..
Simply put, Google has created a distributed social network framework that will end up competing with Facebook and MySpace (and Bebo in markets like the UK). It is kind of a ‘third place’ of social networks- and it is a huge boost to the less populous or more specialized social networks such as Ning, Hi5 and our old friend Friendster”… see more