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Myspace committing to Google's OpenSocial

The story is getting more and more interesting for developers of internet applications: Myspace is joining Google's OpenSocial API camp according to Silicon Alley and confirmed by TechCrunch. Social networkers Bebo and Six Apart are also joining the alliance as are Oracle and Sales Force. It now looks like a large number of major players in the social networking and Internet arena are teaming up to ensure that Facebook does not end up with a lock-up on the developers of social networking applications. They want to ensure that Facebook doesn't become the Net's operating system in alliance with Microsoft.

Will they succeed? The software industry has had its fair share of similar alliance, but I am trying to hard to remember a really successful one. Is anything going to be different this time?

Google raises the bar for Email again

After all the hoopla surrounding the launch of its OpenSocial API (see my recent post), Google has also significantly upgraded their Gmail offering, demonstrating once again how they are working hard to extend and retain their online community.

The Gmail upgrade includes the following significant new features:

  • IMAP access to gmail
  • a storage upgrade, almost doubling the capacity to 4.5 GB

Google has addressed the shortcomings of its POP3 implementation for its Gmail service in a very elegant way. You can now synchronize your folders with Gmail using IMAP, which a very comfortable paradigm to process email. Multiple clients can synchronize different "folders", including Gmail's labels, which act as a kind of virtual folder system. I am not aware of any large free email provider offering IMAP - it usually comes as an additional paid service.

The storage upgrade of course speaks for itself and in this age of multimedia is likely to be attractive to most people. Plus one can really use Gmail as an archive / backup and not have to worry about backups otherwise.

Google's Open Interface for Social Networks

On Thursday, 1 November, 2007 Google
will be announcing their "OpenSocial" API for social networks. This
will be a standard API developers of third party applications for
social networks will be able to use, provided the social network
platform enables it. It will mean that 3rd party developers will be
able to deploy their Google API standard application on all platforms
supporting it.

But which networks are planning to support it? Of course Google's own Orkut will support it. GigaOm reports that XING, Ning, hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo and Friendster are
on board and will be supporting it. This means that OpenSocial is going
to be interesting for developers of external social networking
applications, because they will be able to cover a significant
population of social networkers.

There are a lot of questions that start coming up: