MySpace about to get serious about OpenSocial
MySpace Developer Program
A couple of days ago MySpace announced receiving pre-registration to their MySpace Developer Program a.k.a. MySpace OpenSocial beta. This is the greatest news coming out of OpenSocial community since it has been made public in November 1, 2007.
For those geeky enough to have heard of OpenSocial - it is an open standard that will enable web-based applications akin to Facebook application to show on any social networking web site (or any web site for that matter) data that are related to you and you choose to display. By data I mean anything, your photos, your favourite movies, your night life recommendations,
You-know-who competition
This move by MySpace (i.e. News Corp) comes as especially improtant as Facebook is planning to increase their stronghold on the market by syndicating Facebook apps (i.e. allowing Facebook apps and your data shown in them to appear on your personal website).
Friend, pokes, funwalls - OK, now show me the money
All the Generation Next’s favourite online games like broadcasting funny videos, tagging friend’s photos, instant messaging for everyone to see, exchanging pokes and what not - they’re all fun for users of social networking sites and social utilities. The question is why and how can these be profitable to these “social containers” and social application developers, or in other words: where’s the money? Especially interesting is how MySpace’s foray into OpenSocial will earn money for those creating OpenSocial apps and therefore MySpace itself.
It’s hard to tell anything specific. I do not know much and I bet MySpace doesn’t either. ;-)
What is apparent, some players from the Facebook ecosystem (Max Levchin’s Slide) are getting heavily valuated, so there’s fire behind the smoke curtain.
Not much choice
I guess it will necessarily be an ad-based revenue model. It is all about getting more eyeballs, more time spent on the site and ad rolls trying to attract customers while trying to be more relevant and trying to increase conversion. OpenSocial support is supposed to lower the barrier of entry for a tidal wave of applications that will make you spend more time on MySpace.
In my view, Facebook currently has by far a more consistent user experience and application ease-of-use which translates into Facebook’s immense valuation in the market of social networks/utilities. That is Facebook main value proposition to everyone - user, developers and future investors.
OpenSocial needs to iron out many technical hurdles in order to make it easy for significant number of developers to jump ships. In the case of MySpace, it will need to work actively with developers taking part in the MySpace Developer Program while ironing out their revenue model. Being a big company, MySpace (i.e. News Corp.) will almost certainly do both things at the same time, which always proves to be tricky as in such cases target (market and revenue model) is moving even more quickly.
Future, if any and the best way to predict it…
At the end of the value chain are the big name contracts (i.e. the true OpenSocial customers) which will come if OpenSocial makes it easy to develop and safe to use OpenSocial applications.
Also to have in mind is Google Social Graph API, that could be a part of the future online social networking puzzle.
Cards, some of them, are on the table and more chips needs to fly in for the greater developer community to jump the OpenSocial ship.Currently, OpenSocial is something to play with and MySpace Developer Program I expect to be a much better far-less-buggy environment then Orkut Sandbox.
