Saturday, November 03, 2007

Marc Cantor on Open Social

Google this week introduced a set of open APIs known as 'Open Social' that allow social media software to interoperate. Specifically, Open Social lets developers create containers and applications that can easily integrate with web sites.

Many have speculated that Open Social is Google's challenge to Facebook, and indeed many partners have immediately embraced the new API, including MySpace, Friendster, hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. But (Macromedia founder and CEO of Broadband Mechanics) Marc Cantor says that Google had nothing to loose (since Orkut wasn't that popular), and everything to gain (by positioning itself as a platform for the socialisation of every application). He also doesn't count Yahoo and Microsoft out of the picture.

Robert Scoble has recorded a 20-minute video interview with Marc Cantor that starts slow but has some amazing insights on the Open Social announcement. And there are a couple follow on clips too.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

well i am not quite sure if i haven`t gotten the point properly.
but if that is what google is going to do, then they are a little bit late.
seeing as kyte.tv offers something like that already since quite a while.
not only can you embedd your channel with chat into almost any social network plattform, you can also moderate it from wherever you are with your mobilephone and chat with people, invite them to produce shows on your channels etc...
isn`t google going a step back in this sence ?
cheers ! cyclo