Thought & Theory

It happens so fast in the tech world.

One day you’re the tech darling of the internets and then something comes down the pipes and steals all your shine. While this might seem like a bad thing, I assure you, it can only be good for Facebook and more importantly you the user.

Competition Drives Innovation

Myspace is working on a platform. Friendster was even jumping into the game. These were newsbits from the last couple of weeks before the Open Social announcement. By themselves, they proved to be yawn fests and provided no reason for Facebook to start worrying.

Until Google threw out their bomb.

With the whole internet rallying together, you can be damn sure that Facebook is going to use their new cash investment from Microsoft and friends to come back swinging. That competition will force Facebook into improving their platform and site overall at an accelerated rate. Pressing issues and problems will be solved much faster and in turn will provide benefits to Facebook, Developers and you the user.

The First Step to Owning Your Own Social Graph

At the moment Google’s Open Social does not allow for people to port their Social Graph from network to network. Nor does it allow one universal login to all participating sites (ala OpenID). The important thing to note here is this will be the first step towards both of those goals.

Once you have all the major social networks and communities working together towards a single standard, you essentially have lowered a lot of the barriers of entries for a lot of these initiatives. I think its still a couple years out, but Open Social will provide a strong foundation for it to happen.