Google's New Open Stack Expanding - Sans Facebook, Microsoft
A couple of weeks ago we celebrated the first birthday of Google's OpenSocial project, an open API framework for social networks and websites. Google's OpenSocial Blog recently presented some statistics, including that OpenSocial now reaches nearly 675 M registered users and there are 7,500 applications.
What's interesting about these numbers is that the single largest number of registered users isn't coming from MySpace, hi5 or even Orkut. The largest user base appears to be from 51.com, which as we've reported before is one of China's largest social networks with 130M registered users.
China is obviously a key market for OpenSocial, with another recent Chinese addition being the social network Xiaonei (30M registered people).
Here are the other stats that Google mentioned:
- 315M+ app installs
- 85M+ daily canvas page views
- 7,500+ applications
- 20+ live containers
2,100 of the 7,500 apps are attributed to hi5.
As we noted in our previous post, for the first year OpenSocial has seen tremendous uptake in the online community. The list of organizations developing apps includes AOL, Bebo, hi5, Google, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, Yahoo!. Of course still missing from OpenSocial are Facebook and Microsoft.
Perhaps with MySpace covering the key U.S. base and the Chinese social networks coming on board OpenSocial, Facebook will find itself on the outer. Google looks to be well on its way to defining the "new open stack" and populating it with large social networks - so we have to wonder how long Facebook can hold out, even despite its recent moves to expand Facebook Connect. Check out the full OpenSocial slides here.
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Google wants to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks. And if they pull it off, they’ll be in the center, controlling the network.
The key word here is Open.
Google does not "own" Open Social. See: http://www.opensocial.org/opensocial-foundation
Google Orkut doesn't support the full OpenSocial 0.8 spec. They have only enabled a subset of OpenSocial on Orkut. For a company that is aggressively promoting OpenSocial, I was expecting to see a full implementation by now.
Also, I've been tracking MySpace's OpenSocial environment. It appears to be incredibly buggy. Read the MySpace developer forums and you'll find out how buggy it is:
http://developer.myspace.com/Community/forums/23.aspx
http://developer.myspace.com/Community/forums/34.aspx
Dont touch'just look