Google’s high social networking ambitions gave birth to OpenSocial. OpenSocial has since long been called Google’s response to facebook. OpenSocial is basically a set of common API for building applications on social networking sites. But unlike Facebook where the applications developed can only be used on facebook, the applications built using OpenSocial can be used on a set of websites like MySpace, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. So now, the developers can build applications which can be used in all of these sites without learning different APIs for each. And the users on all these sites would not have to miss out on various features in different websites. Also, this is supposed to increase the popularity of all these websites which are facing stiff competition from facebook. This move by Google is supposed to lure developers and users back into these website which would obviously hurt the popularity of facebook.

But experts have pointed out that there is a logical flaw in all this information. No social networking site with the same basic idea as any other existing site becomes popular by stealing the users from the existing ones. The switching costs from an existing site are always too high to make any new site with the same basic idea as the existing network work(even though it might be better than the existing one). As we had studied in class, the main nodes that remain untouched in a cascade are the ones in tight clusters. The social networking sites which exploit these clusters become realy popular. For example facebook exploited the cluster of college students who wanted something to organize their huge friends network, while linkedIn exploited the professional side of people who wanted to use their weak professional ties when required. Thus, a good networking idea needs to exploit one of these untouched clusters and once that happens, some people from these clusters (and some even from the clusters which have already exploited) become the early adopters. Then slowly, a cascade occurs when the cost to switch becomes really low.

Google’s OpenSocial in all these existing networking sites would just serve the purpose of putting fingers in the holes in a dam. Even though it might save these websites for a short period of time, it would not be able to attract users from facebook simply because the clusters which facebook dominates were not targeted by the other sites and thus would be hard to penetrate. The reason why a social networking site dies is after it has served its purpose, for example, myspace had exclusive media which now does not attract users anymore. Thus, even though OpenSocial would definitely help add better applications to all its partners, it would not be able to affect Facebook’s popularity as of now.

References:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/opensocial-makes-web-better.html
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/
http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2007/11/google-opensocial-and-situational.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/30/details-revealed-google-opensocial-to-be-common-apis-for-building-social-apps/