OpenSocial

Social networking

Face off

Nov 1st 2007 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition

An alliance around Google plans to make social networks more open

COULD Facebook, a three-year-old social network and the hottest internet company of the year, soon be as passé as AOL? AOL, you will recall, was a popular but proprietary online service of the early 1990s. But then Netscape's browser made the web easily and widely available, and today AOL is a lumbering unit of a media conglomerate. Another such “Netscape moment” may just have occurred in online social networks.

On November 1st an alliance including Google, the most popular web-search engine, and several other firms announced a plan to make social networks as open as Netscape's browser made the web. The group released a set of standards, called OpenSocial, that allows software developers to write applications that work with any social network that participates. So far this includes Google's network, Orkut, as well as LinkedIn, Ning, hi5, Friendster, Xing, Plaxo and a few others. Together, these have some 100m users, or twice as many as Facebook has. Oracle and Salesforce.com, two business-software firms, are also supporting the new standards.

This is a stark contrast to the approach taken by Facebook. In May it began allowing outside programmers to write applications that run on Facebook pages. But it requires them to learn a new, proprietary software language to do so, so that such “widgets” run only on Facebook. Thanks to the site's popularity, that has not held developers back. But now they also have the option, with negligible effort, to make their widgets available on many other networks. The biggest developers of Facebook widgets, such as Slide, iLike and RockYou, have already said that they will do so.

Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape in the 1990s and co-founder of Ning, one of Google's partners, believes that the OpenSocial approach is good for almost everyone. First, it is “very, very good for the web”. Second, it is good for Facebook developers, because they can now distribute their widgets elsewhere as well. Third, it is good for anybody who wants to turn a website into an OpenSocial widget, which is very easy.

Facebook itself, Mr Andreessen admits, would “probably prefer to have that proprietary lock-in”, as AOL once did, so it may not be so happy. But Facebook need not be as slow as AOL was in adjusting to an open world. If openness means that social networking becomes mainstream as fast as the web did in the 1990s, all networks could gain. Meanwhile, Facebook is apparently about to reveal a new initiative in online advertising—a field dominated by Google.