Open Social

Marc Andreessen over the past couple days has done some posts about Open Social and how it works with Ning. After reading them I can really see where Google’s Open Social is going. Seems powerful.

All the features and attributes that Ning offers with the integration of Open Social seem just as powerful and helpful as Facebook.

Marc compares Ning with Facebook in his first post.

Open platforms: I don’t see how at the end of the day they won’t win out over closed platforms.

Here is some video from Ning explaining what they are doing with GOOG’s Open Social.

Find more screencasts like this on Ning Network Creators

  • Fraser
    Marshall's 2nd point in his R/WW post captures a lot of what I was saying:"“The OpenSocial APIs might be capable only of allowing widgets to be published from one network to another. Will one network be able to pull in bio, friend and interest data from another? That’s not being discussed at all.”"If all it does is ease the ability to place a similar widget on another profile page that I have to build/manage... where's the real utility for me?
  • Patrick Woodward
    The geographic network perspective is a good one. I agree with you and I'm would bet that most consumers feel the same. ie. "wherever my network is, thats where I'll be."A lot of people switched from MySpace to Facebook but really what was the genesis of this-what was that tipping point for people? Thats same sort of event will have to happen for users to switch again. Are users tired of switching-do they have another "switch" in them? Time will tell when a better option comes along to interact with their network.
  • Fraser
    Right now I'm a lazy consumer (due to a hectic professional life) so I can say that I don't want to manage any more profiles than I already am. And I'm going to manage the profile on the site that has my network.If my sample size of 1 is any measure, I wonder if it's a (geographic) winner takes all situation due to network effects.
  • Patrick Woodward
    That really is a huge problem to dive into and figure out. Self management of online identity is an increasingly relevant issue. We'll probably see a lot more people working on this problem in the near future.
  • Fraser
    I agree with you that open beats closed, and have held the contrarian view that in the long-run ning may be a better bet than facebook (now, open >> greater with open social).Question as a consumer though - do I want to be a member of multiple online networks, requiring the management of multiple profiles? (even if the profiles can pull data from applications like iLike to be synched across all of them)
blog comments powered by Disqus