Myspace,Google follow facebook model

Most of the social networking platforms are following the facebook model by opening their platform for third party applications. This is to counter the momentum facebook has been gaining, after they opened up their platform for third party developers. What’s more interesting is, rumors about Google opening their orkut platform for third party apps. Though early to market, the Google’s orkut hasn't seemed to gain traction except for Brazil and Asia. Expect some announcement in the first week of November 2007. This plan was first disclosed by Michael Arrington on his TechCrunch blog, followed by an Article by business week. Compared to other Social Networking companies, Google has an advantage when it comes to different apps supported by the platform. With the acquisition of Zingku and Jaiku , and the gphone rumors; Google is poised for a shakeup in the Social Networking arena. With so many in-house applications like gmail,gtalk,calender,youtube,iGoogle etc, Google can come up with some interesting mobile and web 2.0 convergences . Where does this leave yahoo’s mash, doesn’t seem to have any impact in this space. I was lucky to get an invite. The UI is pretty slick. More on this later.

Here is a list of Social Networking companies planning or already announced opening up their platform for third party application developers( might have missed some of them )
• Facebook
• Myspace
• Orkut
• Hi5
• Bebo

Myspace and Google platforms are going to be the playground for most of the third party apps. Myspace being the biggest Social Networking community, third party application developers are going to have a field day. As per statistics, facebook currently host around 5000 applications out of which only 10 of them are most popular. It’s going to be an interesting business model for companies that are trying to build apps for Social Networking. Despite the fact that not many apps are successful with facebook, we are still seeing a surge in these applications. Check out a very good Article from Tim oreily about social network operating system. Many folks have compared Social Networking platform as a Social Network operating system. ( Web as a platform ). In the same lines, we would be seeing different operating platforms like Myspace,facebook,orkut etc like windows,linux,mac etc. I would be more interested to see some kind of a cross platform between Social Networking. Alas, I doubt Social Networking companies are going to open up their walled garden. Forget Social Networking, we are yet to see IM vendors open up their platform for cross platform messaging. Apparently, from what I read, Google has promised to be more open than any other Social Networking platform. Well, Google has other options to monetize. Besides, orkut is most popular in countries where u can hardly monetize

Here are some features I would love to see in future:
• Single sign on, or OpenID as some people call it for all my registration on the web.
• More control on my personal social graph data.
• Cross platform interface between Social Networking
• Converged messaging platform using which I can share media, post status( active streaming) to all the communities. ( Something similar to netvibes model )
• Single presence status that applies to all the different communities I belong to.
• IM/Text/Email message convergence, I should be able to send messages to my community using any of my messaging tool likes IM,twitter,jaiku web etc
• Very simple mobile interface using which I can share all my media from handset seamlessly with my friends on different Social Networking community.


So folks interesting times ahead in social networking space, expect lot of innovative apps. Feel free to drop me a line on your requirement for social networking platform.