14 DAY TRIAL // The Mountain View company made what seems to be the smartest move to respond to its rivals' evolution into the social networking battle where the web firms are allying with top players to expand their technologies. Today, Google officially released OpenSocial, a set of APIs which can help the developers design social applications compatible with numerous social networks. The most interesting aspect of the new technology is that OpenSocial received the support of the top players in the competition including Bebo, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, mixi, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut and others.
"The web is fundamentally better when it's social, and we're only just starting to see what's possible when you bring social information into different contexts on the web," said Jeff Huber, senior vice president of engineering, Google. "There's a lot of innovation that will be spurred simply by creating a standard way for developers to run social applications in more places. With the input and iteration of the community, we hope OpenSocial will become a standard set of technologies for making the web social."
Nowadays, every Internet giant has its own social network technology which supports its products and helps them expand their offering. While Microsoft signed a deal with Facebook to become the exclusive ad provider, Yahoo made a similar move in Australia where it partnered with Bebo. Sure, Microsoft's agreement seems to top all the rivals' moves because the Redmond-based company is now able to bring its adverts straight to the millions of users accessing all versions of Facebook.
However, besides Google, it looks like the company to win the most after this release, orkut - which is actually a social network owned by the super giant -, will become more powerful on a market dominated by MySpace and Facebook.
"orkut has tens of millions of passionate users who are constantly clamoring for new ways to have fun with their friends and express themselves through orkut," said Amar Gandhi, group product manager for orkut, Google's social networking service. "By using OpenSocial to open up orkut as a platform for any developer, we can tap into the vast creativity of the community and make new features available to our users frequently."