MySpace Joins Google on OpenSocial

John Musser, November 2nd, 2007   Comments(2)

Yesterday was another very busy news day on the subject of social network platforms. The big news was that MySpace and Bebo joined the swelling ranks of social networks supporting the Google-lead OpenSocial API initiative. This means that OpenSocial will provide access to over 200 million user accounts. Lots of coverage and discussion around this. Here’s a roundup of some worthwhile coverage of the news:

• Dan Farber attended last night’s Google Campfire and filed this report with photos.
• ZDNet’s David Berlind provides a complete audio recording of the afternoon Google-MySpace press conference announcing the news of MySpace and Bebo supporting the OpenSocial APIs. Attendees included Google CEO Eric Schmidt and MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe. During the conference David himself asks a couple of questions including how will identity mapping be handled across social networks.
• David Berlind also looks at OpenSocial Business Models. In particular whether the system still favor a handful of major players providing the primary “social containers”?
• Michael Arrington reported that Facebook had not been briefed on OpenSocial, but that Facebook’s claim here has been disputed.
• Marc Andreessen blogged a set of OpenSocial screenshots and screencast.
• The Mashable folks talk with Hi5 CEO Ramu Yalamanchi about OpenSocial on their network.
• Dave Winer looks at the MySpace announcement and asks Where’s the Beef?.
• Marc Canter answers a couple reader questions about OpenSocial.
• Joseph Smarr posts that OpenSocial is live on Plaxo Pulse. Note, Joseph points-out that the APIs are at version 0.5 and are “changing almost daily”. Internet time as they used to say in the old days.

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