Point Oh!

Sure Google gets routinely criticized for dominating search while floundering in other areas of online media (until they buy someone) but you have to give them credit for constantly pumping out new technology that, at least on the surface, seems well ahead of it’s time. With the rise of Facebook applications, Google has stepped in an created an API for new applications that works across multiple social networks, including hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning and others.  If you’re interested in more information, Brady Forrest has a great post on it at the O’Reilly Radar.

The whole thing makes me think back to the state of instant messaging a couple years ago.  Instant messaging went from being a fringe technology to something that everyone uses.  At first there was discussion about opening the standard but the AOLs of the world pushed back, thinking that they would lose some advertising real estate.

In the case of social networking, any resistance to open standards makes significantly less sense.  If third party developers start creating really compelling applications that run on your social network, you will not only be seeing new traffic but increasing your average time on site and probably page views, all great things for people selling ad space.  So why hasn’t Facebook and MySpace signed on?

The main reason is probably greed.  Facebook is pretty much mopping up the competition in this space and their applications are cleaner and function better than just about anything you will see on MySpace or any other social networks.  There is no incentive for them to agree to the OpenSocial standard until they start losing traffic to the niche networks that are so eager to adopt something like this.

Start the clock.  I’m predicting that a standard is in place for all social networks by summer 2008, although I’m not saying that it will be the Google standard.