I’ve spent the better part of yesterday and today trying to wrap my brain around exactly what Open Social means for social networks, online community builders and users. And while it may mean many things for all of these groups down the line, that all depends on one thing: developers developers developers developers!
Because right now, that’s really all that matters to Open Social. It won’t really start to mean anything until developers start doing cool stuff with it.
But this is not the Field of Dreams. Even if you build it, they might not come.
And who are “they?” Users, users, users, users. And not just any users. ACTIVE users.
Open Social is revolutionary, to be sure. But I’m not so sure it’s a Facebook killer. Tris Hussey sure thinks so, but he’s a famous Facebook curmudgeon. He once told me that if it weren’t for Scrabulous, he probably wouldn’t be on Facebook at all.
Facebook wasn’t built for people like Tris. (Sorry buddy, but it’s true.) It was built for people like me who can’t resist sucking all of our content into one central location and updating it constantly with new information, and then spitting that content out to our friends. Robert Scoble is like that too, except he’s too popular.
Facebook is not a perfect solution. Not by a long shot. It imposes too many limits when it should be breaking down doors. But it’s still a great place to be and — like Saul Hansell so astutely wrote — there isn’t any one single application that could draw my eyeballs away from it at this point.
In the end, the social platform that wins this battle for supremacy will deliver three things:
- Great user experience: listens to users, eliminates limitations (possibly through a freemium service), prevents spam, protects privacy.
- Great developer experience: straightforward API, deep integration points, plenty of opportunities to monetize.
- Great information experience: portability of personal data in and out of the site via simple .csv files AND by tying into multi-container platforms like Open Social.
If Facebook can become that social platform in the relatively near future, it will keep my eyeballs. Possibly for the rest of my life. If not, I’ll move on with the rest of the geeks.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Krish 11.01.07 at 4:07 pm
I think, with the addition of Myspace and Bebo, the users are already there. Imagine the millions of users using gmail (and if Yahoo follows the trend, Yahoo Mail). Imagine you having a facebook kinda experience with all those in your address book. Thatz what open social can deliver in the future. Also, open social already satisfies all the three things you have quoted whereas facebook doesn’t satisfy #3. The only way for facebook to regain the momentum back from open social is by opening up completely and make open social look like a walled garden with Google having the keys.
Tris Hussey 11.02.07 at 8:52 am
LOL so true! It’s game changing, but you are bang on, OpenSocial is all about developers, it will be up to them to take advantage of it’s potential.
Teresa Valdez Klein 11.02.07 at 9:44 am
How many daily active users does MySpace have? We don’t know, because they really tell us only the number of accounts on the system.
People aren’t as obsessed with MySpace as they are with Facebook because there’s simply more to do with Facebook.
That could change when interactive, social applications come along. But I don’t see them succeeding on MySpace or Bebo the way they do on Facebook.
The pieces just aren’t all in place.