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Thursday, November 01, 2007
As reported in the New York Times, Google has cleverly brought several of the world's largest social networks on board of a new open standard for social networking apps. Bill Tancer of Hitwise expertly quantifies the current state of affairs, assessing Facebook's traffic to be 9X of the OpenSocial sites combined (these include Friendster, LinkedIn, and hi5). He also notes that trends can turn very quickly in this business.
While the combined effort to allow outside developers to power the platforms is interesting in itself, a separate but related competitive question is whether one or two of these networks will see a real surge in usage -- either because there are more open source apps available, or for some other reason, like people getting bored of Facebook. Some of them are obviously quite good -- I still think a lot of LinkedIn -- so there is still a chance a couple of them will race ahead and narrow that 9 to 1 gap.Labels: OpenSocial, social networking
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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