The Economist: Face Off: Social Networking
An alliance around Google plans to make social networks more open.
COULD Facebook, a three-year-old social network and the hottest internet company of the year, soon be as passé as AOL? AOL, you will recall, was a popular but proprietary online service of the early 1990s. But then Netscape's browser made the web easily and widely available, and today AOL is a lumbering unit of a media conglomerate. Another such “Netscape moment” may just have occurred in online social networks.
On November 1st an alliance including Google, the most popular web-search engine, and several other firms announced a plan to make social networks as open as Netscape's browser made the web. The group released a set of standards, called OpenSocial, that allows software developers to write applications that work with any social network that participates. So far this includes Google's network, Orkut, as well as LinkedIn, Ning, hi5, Friendster, Xing, Plaxo and a few others. Together, these have some 100m users, or twice as many as Facebook has. Oracle and Salesforce.com, two business-software firms, are also supporting the new standards. …
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