Google has been leaking like a leaky bucket (strategically or not) over its plans to ramp up social networking and take on Facebook - a project which no doubt shot up its list of priorities when it lost out to Microsoft on a Facebook stake.
It will not have escaped the notice of Google that Facebook is essentially a dirty great depository for the kind of demographic information that most advertisers would give employees limbs for, and hence the interest.
Google is expected to confirm OpenSocial tomorrow, reports GigaOm, which will join up various Google services including its social networking site Orkut (big in Brazil, apparently) with some new partners including LinkedIn (the social networking site for people with no personality), Friendster (the social networking site everyone forgot), Ning (the DIY social network), hi5 (the "yocial" network) and Plaxo, XING and Newsgator bundled in for good measure.
The proposition is a set of shared APIs, or code that allows developers to build applications that work across all these services. It's a common tech idea and one that had only been used sparingly by big organisations until Facebook took the idea and ran with it earlier this year.
There are nearly 7,000 applications designed for Facebook now; opening up a back door to its code was a clever move on Facebook's part because it meant increased appeal for its users. And most of the applications were built by people outside Facebook, effectively outsourcing a major part of its the site's experimental, development work for free. Nicely done.
That's the spot that Google wants to hit.
"OpenSocial attacks Facebook where it is the weakest (and the strongest): its quintessential closed nature. Several Facebook developers have groused that a special Facebook-only mark-up language makes the task of writing Facebook apps tougher," says Om Malik on GigaOM.
Mike Arrington on TechCrunch said the timing couldn't have been better, and Valleywag sums it up: "The goal? To make it unattractive for developers to lock themselves into the Facebook platform. Boo!"
Source: GigaOm
Technorati Tags: Facebook, Google
