Details Revealed: Google OpenSocial To Launch Thursday
Details emerged today on Google's broad social networking ambitions, first reported here in late September, with a follow up earlier this week. The new project, called OpenSocial (URL will go live on Thursday), goes well beyond what we've previously reported.
Context & Ripple Effects
TechCrunch first flagged Google's counter-move on September 21, reporting a plan to "out open" Facebook ahead of a November 5 announcement; today's follow-up names the project — OpenSocial — and pulls the go-live forward to this Thursday. The reveal comes weeks after Google lost its bid to invest in Facebook outright, with a separate internal effort reportedly codenamed Maka-Maka still unconfirmed.
The leak travelled unusually far for a pre-launch story: the New York Times ("Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook"), CNET, GigaOM, VentureBeat and All Facebook all carried versions within a day, evidence the industry had already framed this as a direct ads-and-platform confrontation with Facebook rather than a routine product launch.
First-order effects
- Third-party developers get a standard set of social-application APIs that, per the report, extends beyond any single network — a direct strike at the exclusivity of Facebook's own developer platform, which has been pulling widgets and talent since spring.
- Google puts a live URL and spec in front of developers on Thursday, forcing every major social network to declare a position on an open standard backed by the web's dominant ad seller.
Second-order effects
- Second-tier social networks face a join-or-isolate decision: an open spec backed by Google cuts their cost of offering applications dramatically, squeezing networks that stay closed on distribution.
- Application developers gain leverage either way — portability across multiple networks weakens dependence on any single platform's terms, and press framing (All Facebook's "Adsense Killer" headline) signals advertisers may be the real prize.
Third-order effects
- If major networks adopt the spec, value migrates from owning the social graph toward whoever controls application distribution and monetization across many networks — a structure that favours Google's existing ad machinery and echoes its rumored (unconfirmed) talks with Verizon Wireless to place its applications on carrier phones.
- The episode points toward platform wars fought through standards bodies and partner coalitions rather than product cycles, raising the odds that regulators and antitrust watchers take an interest once open-vs-closed becomes the central axis of consumer-web competition.
The trend: Consumer web platforms are escalating from feature competition to standards competition, using open APIs and partner coalitions to recruit developers away from a rival's proprietary ecosystem.