OpenSocial: It’s All About The Context, Stupid
It’s been almost impossible to miss the news leaking out about the launch of Google’s new OpenSocial platform this week, as the names of those networks involved continued to grow. OpenSocial aims to mimic the success of Facebook’s developer platform (although no-one at Google is likely to admit as much) by allowing developers access to APIs so that they can develop applications for a multitude of sites. According to the official OpenSocial blog, which is now live, the networks signed up so far are:
Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.
The inclusion of MySpace & Bebo is obviously a huge coup for Google, as they are two of the biggest social networks out there; they are also perfect for the sort of ‘fun’ applications that have proliferated on Facebook (Bite my vampire were-wolf Jedi anyone?) What has been discussed less is exactly how more professional sites such as LinkedIn will benefit. According to an article on CNet, the powers that be at LinkedIn have been assured that they can control exactly how open they choose to be:
OpenSocial) doesn’t change the fact that we truly have no interest in zombie biting and food fights on LinkedIn… In order to be in the LinkedIn directory, we will have some set of standards.
What this means of course is that OpenSocial may not turn out to be the panacea 2.0 that some marketers & developers may like to imagine. If you’re looking to target users on sites such as LinkedIn then you’re still going to need to come up with a targeted strategy and applications to match, rather than just creating something to roll out across the whole OpenSocial network.
At present the applications bening promoted on the OpenSocial blog appear to be of a similar type to those on Facebook; a gadget to display Jimi Hendrix lyrics, a virtual bookshelf, an app which displays your football team, none of which strike me as being of particular interest to the senior professionals who make up LinkedIn’s audience.
Social networks & social media are dangerous bandwagons to jump on if you haven’t thought your actions through, which is why even with the launch of OpenSocial it’s (still) all about the context, stupid!
Regarding LinkedIn, what’s also interesting to note is that Oracle and Salesforce are signed up to the initiative as well, so this would lead one to believe some more business oriented apps are coming down the pike.
I’ve also blogged about how OpenSocial could impact the affiliate marketing industry (linked to my name).