The goal of this blog is to help to create an online learning environment and my specific purpose is to use such a system to help people learn English. In the summer, I proposed a model for the environment that used Ning’s social network sitting on top of Facebook with content to be developed by teachers and learners and a user-interface that used Adobe’s cool new AIR technology. Facebook was my choice for the base of the system because people know it and use it. Simple. But, as many people have pointed out, Facebook is a more or less closed system. To open-source believers, this is poison. Period. But to content developers, like myself, as long as a system is powerful and easy to use and popular, I don’t really care that it is closed.
However, as I suffer using the bloated and dumb Vista operating system on my laptop, I’m often reminded that being tied into a big system is not such a good idea when the big system has gone dumb. (Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau used to joke about how it was difficult being a Canadian next to the USA because it was like being a mouse, sleeping next to an elephant.)
Anil Dash’s words made a lot of sense, when, on October 9th, he warned that the proprietary nature of Facebook was running counter to web logic:
Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do.
Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch asked the obvious question:
So how long does Facebook have before it melts into the Web?
Now we know the answer to Schonfeld’s question: less than one month because, on November 1st, Google announced OpenSocial. The announcment is causing a storm among web commentators and experts but what does it mean to content developers?
First, what is OpenSocial? Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb describes it this way:
OpenSocial is a hugely ambitious project that would tie together Google, MySpace and numerous other social networking platforms in a common environment that application publishers could publish widgets to with one set of code.
So for content developers, it becomes a ‘write once’ situation, after which they gain access to a huge variety of interesting additional functionality. Nice. Facebook has the same possible extension of capability, of course, but it is always within a Facebook-world. OpenSocial is different because there is a standard and accessible application programming interface. Kirkpatrick wonders about the devil in the details and asks , ‘How open?’, but Marc Andreessen, who was a huge fan of Facebook, likes OpenSocial and his company, Ning, has already joined the initiative; he describes the development in this way:
In a nutshell, OpenSocial is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:
“Containers” — social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and…
“Apps” — applications that want to be embedded within containers — for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.
This is the exact same concept as the Facebook platform, with two huge differences:
With the Facebook platform, only Facebook itself can be a “container” — “apps” can only run within Facebook itself. In contrast, with Open Social, any social network can be an Open Social container and allow Open Social apps to run within it.
With the Facebook platform, app developers build to Facebook-proprietary languages and APIs such as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) — those languages and APIs don’t work anywhere other than Facebook — and then the apps can only run within Facebook. In contrast, with Open Social, app developers can build to standard HTML and Javascript, and their apps can then run in any Open Social container.
If you recall how I previously described the Facebook platform as “a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry”, you’ll understand why I think OpenSocial is the next big leap forward! OpenSocial takes the Facebook platform concept and provides an open standard approach that can be used by the entire web. OpenSocial is an open way for everyone to do what Facebook has done…
If you have a web site today, and you want to turn your web site into an OpenSocial app, that’s perhaps even easier than “porting” a Facebook app. Just take your current HTML and Javascript front-end pages and create a version of those pages that use the Open Social API. QED.
Andreesenn says it’s even a good thing for Facebook because the key at this stage is market development and “Open Social will definitely help fuel market expansion, which is in everyone’s interest, including Facebook’s.”
The thing that will make the market grow is content, of course. Most users want some kind of service from the web and the capability to connect with other people in order to use that service and content. It’s content and connection that makes a social network compelling. The ‘winner’ will be the social network or collection of networks that makes it easier for content to be developed.
Schonfeld of TechCrunch - who, you remember, was watching the Facebook ice melting in the warm web-sea - is aware that all the talk of underlying system software isn’t what users respond to:
No actual consumers have changed their social networking habits because of OpenSocial. Facebook still has all the momentum with consumers (and, thus, with the developers who want to reach them). It can afford to wait and see how this whole OpenSocial thing plays out.
It just cannot wait too long before deciding its next move.
He’s right on both counts but the time factor with the web can be scarily fast. The guys at Hitwise, a site that counts how many people are using the various social networks, were not so thrilled by OpenSocial on Day One because, according to their count, FB’s user-base was 5 times bigger than all the networks that had signed up to OpenSocial. Their post the following day was titled, ‘What a difference a day makes’: the OpenSocial grouping had grown to be 5 times larger than Facebook!
But, remember the experienced voice of Andreessen who is telling us all that most web users are signed on to NO social networks, presumably because they can’t find the content there that makes the effort worth their while. Another veteran analyst, Marc Eisenberg, urged everyone to calm down but called the release of OpenSocial, ‘a nice transitional moment.’
Of course FB is busy adding lots of good stuff to their service: an ad network that will generate income for content developers and ways for content creators to very easily build Facebook applications. All good stuff.
But, it’s not a battle, it’s a war and Google is active on many fronts that Facebook can only dream of: there’s rumoured to be a Google Operating System in the works and a GooglePhone, or at least some GoogleThing that will bring all things Google – including the OpenSocial stuff – to mobile devices. And Google has the money to keep going. Another potential plus: Google’s potential social networking partners are more powerful than FB in their respective turfs. Mashable recently quoted a study:
… there are actually more social networking users (as measured by unique visitors) in Asia-Pacific (where Friendster leads) and Europe (where Bebo leads) than in North America.
Of course, Microsoft has invested in Facebook, and MS has the money and the world-reach that’s required. However a crucial point was made by Dana Blankenhorn at ZDNet
The software business model is being replaced by the online advertising model.
Microsoft was built on the former and remains so; Google lives and breathes the latter.
Meanwhile…there are 5,000 content developers who will make all this software engineering stuff of interest to real people. So the decisive question may be: Who understands content developers better: Microsoft/Facebook or Google/OpenSocial?
“But answer came there none…” as Lewis Carroll said. The full poem is worth reading because it brilliantly describes the devouring of little ones.
