Search Giant is Taking Steps Toward Adding Social Layers
Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch just dropped a bomb with news that on November 5th, Google is going to be opening-up their platform for third party developers as a direct response to Facebook’s opening-up to third parties just a few months ago. According to Arrington’s sources,
Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.
With access to Okurt data, developers will be able to leverage Okurt’s social graph to create Google and non-Google applications that will greatly increase the social nature of Google. While the first incarnation of Google’s open platform will not kill Facebook, the future plans that will be built off of this could. Think about it, as a developer, you could spend your time making applications that leverages Google’s data and can “live” anywhere or you can develop on the Facebook platform utilizing their data and “living” inside of their platform. I have to believe that a majority of developers will flock to Google from Facebook potentially killing the one aspect that separates Facebook from other social networks.
Although almost every initiative that Google has announced, outside of search, has been less then threatening to a market leader, if any one entity has the power to shift the social network paradigm it is Google. Something tells me this initiative will have a vastly different outcome then anything they have done before.
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1 comment so far ↓
Social networks could be an example of something that should be a natural monopoly (in economics, the term used for things that are better for everyone if they are monopolistic, like utilities, postal service, etc).
It’s tiring to have so many social networks, so I’d almost welcome Google taking over and kicking ass in this arena, just like I’d really like only one chat platform (though software like Adium can solve the multi-platform chat problem).
We either need a common social network platform that has a predefined set of APIs with multiple companies employing a set of standards (not likely to happen!), or we need one company to dominate the space. I don’t want to live in multiple social networks. IMO, Facebook is the best at what it does right now, so Google buying Facebook would be fine with me.
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