Many people applauded Facebook when they launched the Facebook Platform and allowed third party developers to build applications on their website. In fact, this was somewhat of a revolutionary move that contributed to Facebook’s estimated $15 billion value today. Naturally, all the other guys wanted a piece of this pie: MySpace, Six Apart, Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo, Oracle and the Undisputed King of the Web: Google. So, these companies teamed up and under the umbrella of Google and launched OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a platform much like Facebook’s, except its not a closed platform… i.e. the applications can be installed on any of the previously mentioned networks.
This move by Google and the rest is very interesting… At the end of the day, its just a classic case of ganging up on the center of attention and bullying it out of the way…. Fortunately, Facebook has the Giant Microsoft as a friend and investor and a few other backers… so its not alone in the game.
In a previous post, I mentioned how the most valuable asset that Facebook currently has is the intimate knowledge of its 50 million members and their relationships with each other. This is exactly what makes Facebook sticky. In other words, you wouldn’t leave Facebook to go to another social network as that would mean finding and re-adding all your friends. They have to be very careful going forward as its a chess game from here… Google has made the first move… but a good chess player can predict his oponnents moves. In this case, Google is slowly attempting to get Facebook to give up some preliminary assets (proprietary platform), before it goes after the main treasure: Facebook’s Social Graph.
Despite what most of the blogs and the web says, Facebook can’t give in to Google and risk becoming just another social network.
Aydin.
