OpenSocial: Facebook is About to Be Hit With “Embrace and Extend” - Perhaps Also “Extinguish”?

As expected, Google has announced a set of common APIs for creating applications that will work on multiple networks. Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle have all agreed to participate as partners with Google in this initiative.

We old timers have been through this before, back when Microsoft created a platform that embraced the same HTML that Netscape Navigator could read, but offered “new functionality.”

Wikipedia offers a three point analysis of what might be in store for Facebook:

“1. Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
2. Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the ’simple’ standard.
3. Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions .”

As Michael Arrington says: “The benefit of the Google approach is that developers can use much of their existing front end code and simply tailor it slightly for OpenSocial, so creating applications is even easier than on Facebook.”

What’s really interesting is that one of the most visible partners in this effort is none other than Ning, the network led by Marc Andreesen, the cofounder of Netscape. Considering Facebook’s close alliance with Microsoft, there is no shortage of irony here.

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