Friday, November 02, 2007

Standards as a business strategy

Team “OpenSocial” To Take Facebook Down
It is being reported that Facebook may not be allowed the clout they have been receiving recently after all. Tomorrow, Google will begin heading up an alliance of social networks that will begin opening up their sites to outside software developers. This group will introduce a common set of standards for this practice, according to The New York Times.

The group includes Orkut, LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning. Since it opened its site to outside developers last spring, Facebook has had over 5,000 small programs built to run on its site.

The plan was supposed to be unveiled at a Google party tomorrow night, but people briefed on this, let the New York Times know about it and Google confirmed to the publication.

An anonymous source said to the NY Times “It is going to forestall Facebook’s ability to get everyone writing just for Facebook.” OpenSocial as the platform will be known is “compatible across all the companies,” according to that same source.


This is a good example of the use of standards to acquire market share.

I don't understand why the source for this article was anonymous. What was the point of the leak? Just to show off?

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