What does this mean for Facebook? I believe Google is already very successful at gleaning major mindshare in the Social Networking sphere. Now that MySpace is on board, Facebook faces some major competition. But should Facebook view this as competition? Or as a good opportunity?
I believe Facebook should accept OpenSocial, too. Unfortunately, this would sacrifice security, control, and alienate the thousands of developers who have already contributed time and money to develop Facebook applications with FBML and FQL (see http://developer.facebook.com/).
I do think this will make the lives of developers easier. But ultimately, it must make the lives of users easier in order to become widely adopted. And it will. Users can centralize core profile and activity information in a single location, making it easy to change and distribute profile changes to numerous social networking branches.
Overall, I see OpenSocial (assuming adequate privacy protections are put in place) as a major step forward both for developers and users, and a move toward unified/persistent web identities.
Sources:
MacWorld
New York Times
ArsTechnica
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment