Checkmate? MySpace, Bebo and SixApart To Join Google OpenSocial (confirmed)
Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle. — MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google's OpenSocial initiative.
Context & Ripple Effects
This confirmation lands two days after TechCrunch revealed the details of Google's planned Thursday launch of OpenSocial, and one day after Marc Andreessen's blog post framed the effort as 'a new universe of social applications all over the web.' What changed today is the roster: MySpace, Bebo and Six Apart are now confirmed participants rather than rumored ones.
The story travelled unusually far for a developer-platform announcement — Reuters, the New York Times and NYT's Bits blog all picked it up, with headlines explicitly casting it as an anti-Facebook alliance ('The Great Facebook Team-Up?', 'MySpace Joins Google Alliance to Counter Facebook'). TechCrunch's companion pieces capture Facebook's position on the day itself: 'Your Move,' alongside Facebook's statement that it has not been briefed on OpenSocial.
First-order effects
- MySpace, Bebo and Six Apart immediately gain a shared application framework from Google, letting developers write social apps once and run them across all three networks instead of porting per-platform as Facebook's model requires.
- Facebook is put on the defensive on day one — it concedes it has not been briefed on OpenSocial, meaning the largest rival to the coalition learned of the counter-platform through the press.
Second-order effects
- Developer economics tilt toward the coalition: with MySpace's audience plus Bebo's and Six Apart's reachable through one API, the marginal cost of supporting Facebook's proprietary stack rises, forcing Facebook to respond either by opening its own standards or competing harder on distribution quality inside its wall.
- Google acquires distribution leverage across its partners' combined audiences without owning a social network of its own — the ad and app plumbing layer becomes Google's position in a market where its own Orkut was not the winner.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, competition in social networking migrates from network size to API standards — whoever defines the common container for third-party apps sets terms for every participating network, a structural role previously held by whichever platform had the most users.
- The durability question is whether a coalition of networks that still compete with each other can sustain a shared standard, or whether members defect when individual incentives diverge — the same tension that has shaped every industry consortium built against a dominant incumbent.
The trend: Platform power in social networking is shifting from closed single-network app ecosystems toward cross-network open API coalitions assembled specifically to counter a dominant closed platform.