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Yahoo eyes OpenSocial; When will Facebook join?

By | March 12, 2008, 3:48am PDT

Summary: Yahoo may join Google’s OpenSocial, a standards effort to allow social networks to communicate and share data. If Yahoo joins OpenSocial the set of standards would have a critical mass of big players lined up behind it. According to Miguel Helft in the New York Times’ Bits blog, Yahoo may announce its participation as “early as [...]

Yahoo may join Google’s OpenSocial, a standards effort to allow social networks to communicate and share data. If Yahoo joins OpenSocial the set of standards would have a critical mass of big players lined up behind it.

According to Miguel Helft in the New York Times’ Bits blog, Yahoo may announce its participation as “early as this week.”

Google’s OpenSocial includes MySpace and every other social network (LinkedIn, Ning, Orkut, Oracle etc.) not named Facebook. Yahoo would just make the dog pile worse.

So what do you do if you’re Facebook? You could continue to go it alone in a strategy that may be fine in the short-term. Facebook has enough momentum to do what it wants. Dan Farber adds that Facebook has been cool to OpenSocial and is taking a wait and see approach. And why not? Facebook has an army of developers creating application. It’s not like developers are ignoring Facebook.

But at some point in the future social networking standards will matter. And Facebook could neutralize a potential threat merely by joining OpenSocial.

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Topics

Facebook, Yahoo! Inc., Google OpenSocial, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.

Disclosure

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan has nothing to disclose. He doesn’t hold investments in the technology companies he covers.

Biography

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

For daily updates, follow Larry on Twitter.

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RE: Yahoo eyes OpenSocial; When will Facebook join?
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well done
uzairimran 12th Mar 2008
It will promote I.T bussiness.
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Don't see Facebook fans caring
Prognosticator 12th Mar 2008
Granted this is a tech forum but Facebook fans are not inclined to care how the sausage is made - that is, using open or closed protocols.

I'm a facebook fan because it provides a better social networking experience than Myspace. Unless the "open" community develops something truly compelling, this is a don't care for me and likely most others.

I would say that this "coalition of open social protocols" is a good thing in principle but how it provides a better solution that say, a proprietary Facebook is another thing.
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Definitely True
Caggles 17th Mar 2008
I'm a facebook user, same reason, some apathy concerning open protocols. The only time I could see it becoming an issue is if (or when) OpenSocial gives users the ability to synchronize friends between sites. In my case, that's still not a big deal because everyone that I'm friends with is on Facebook, but for those people who have to keep track of Facebook, MySpace, etc, because all of their friends are spread over the sites, it could become an issue for them if all the OpenSocial sites give the user the ability to join one of the websites and become friends with anyone on any other of its affiliate OpenSocial sites. Now, whether or not that will ever happen, I have no idea, but if it does, I could see it becoming an issue for Facebook as the only stand-alone social networking site.
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RE: Yahoo eyes OpenSocial; When will Facebook join?
a_chameleon 12th Mar 2008
"And Facebook could neutralize a potential threat merely by joining OpenSocial"

And face the inevitable; Open Source leads to bigger & better products.

The Team
http://iserviceshop.blogspot.com
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