Point Oh!

I made a prediction a couple years ago that MySpace would be irrelevant within two years.

I was wrong.

Say what you will about MySpace but it’s certainly not irrelevant right now.  I would argue that it’s a Web property in decline and, regardless how often News Corp spits out numbers to the contrary, the demographics aren’t that attractive to most adertisers.

Of course, just as MySpace capitialized on the decline of Friendster, now Facebook is capitalizing on the decline of MySpace.  This begs the question “who will capitialize on the inevitable decline of Facebook?”

The answer is that no one will.

The days of dominating social networks will be coming to a close thanks largely to the work of Google and the OpenSocial movement.  The swift work of Google is making the Data Portability debate fade into the background.  Today Google allows anyone to take advantage of Facebook’s inevitable collapse with their Friend Connect initiative.  You can bring your profile from just about anywhere, it’s yours.

Friend Connect is also super simple.  It gives you a modular set of widgets that allows you to add social networking features to your site.  This includes OpenSocial applications and whatever else gets built to accommodate this new system.

How easy is it?  Well I added the basic members gadget over there to your right in about two minutes after dropping two files on my server.  You can add other gadgets, such as a commenting wall, ratings system, community game or any OpenSocial app just as easily.

That’s it.  Anyone can turn their site into a social network in two minutes.  I’ll spare you another prediction in fear of being proven wrong again but I think you can see where this is going.