It's only been one day since MySpace and Google joined forces to fire a shot across the bow of Facebook, and third-party social network developers are already jumping on the sink Facebook bandwagon.
Plaxo on Friday unveiled new dynamic profiles that support Google's new OpenSocial APIs. Users of Plaxo's Pulse social network can now create distinct professional and personal profiles that include photos, contact information and privacy settings. Any applications written to the Google OpenSocial APIs can be embedded in the profiles, Plaxo said.
Google said the impetus behind OpenSocial was to allow developers to learn one API and then be able to write a social application for any OpenSocial partner site
"And because it's built on Web standards like HTML and JavaScript, developers don't have to learn a custom programming languages," noted Amar Gandhi and Peter Chane, group product managers at Google in a blog post.
Google estimates that more than 200 million users of the websites that have committed to OpenSocial, like MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn, will have access to these applications.
Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen (later acquired by AOL in 1998) blogged that OpenSocial dispels the common assumption held by some that Facebook has established unquestionable dominance in the social networking world.
"I am not predicting the death of Facebook," Andreesen blogged. "I think the Facebook people are brilliant and are going to do very well over the next several years. But the idea that you hear from time to time that 'all the users are on Facebook' and 'the game is over; the Facebook platform has won' is silly, as you can see every time you use a website that doesn't end in aol.com."
Andreessen, of course, founded Ning, a company that allows users to build their own social networks and is an OpenSocial partner. Ning plans to make OpenSocial applications available to all of its 113,000 social networks later this year or early next spring, the company said. OpenSocial applications will run inside social networks across Ning, the company said.
Source:Xinhua/Agencies
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