Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Google's new OpenSocial API promises developers a mechanism that will allow applications to work with more than one social networking site, but at this stage the Big Two - Facebook and MySpace - aren't joining the fun.
At present, sites such as Facebook provide an API allowing the creation of applications on that platform. There is no portability between sites, and ideas must be re-implemented. This means a company that has developed a successful application for MySpace faces a major effort to port it to Facebook, for example.
OpenSocial would reduce the effort required to create such applications for different platforms by standardising functions for accessing profile, friend and activity information.
Apart from Google's own Orkut, participating social networks include Friendster, hi5 and Ning. Developers supporting the standard include iLike and Slide.
Also significant is the business focus of some members of the OpenSocial camp, notably LinkedIn and Plaxo. Furthermore, Oracle and Salesforce.com are onboard, so we can expect to see some serious business applications.
On one hand, OpenSocial reduces the points of difference between participating social networks; on the other, it will increase the range of applications available to users of those networks. On balance, it will probably be a net benefit for smaller networks struggling to compete with Facebook and MySpace.
What's in it for Google? Apart from the fact that it operates a small social networking site and was beaten to a stake in Facebook by Microsoft, one possibility is that it could leverage OpenSocial to improve the effectiveness of AdSense advertising on participating networks. For example, if a certain ad is clicked on a particular individual's page, it might be effective to deliver the same ad to friends' pages.
An open API is by its nature open for anyone to use, but showing it is a team player can't hurt Google's chances to stitch up advertising deals with participating social networks, counteracting Microsoft's sole-supplier status with Facebook.
The OpenSocial API will be published later today on Google Code.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
LATEST HEADLINES FROM YOUR IT
