In social networks we do not waste time - half a year in battle gets you a veteran’s badge.
Facebook has introduced it’s open platfrom about 6 months ago. Since than more that 70,000 developers lined up under its flags. About a month ago Google introduced its OpenSocial that is a direct competitor with Facebook’s platfrom. Small company with a lot of users an developers against a big company with not so many users and no developers. The stage is set.
The biggest threat to Facebook application platfrom and applications running on it is the Facebook itself. Or is it a benefit? Anyway, Facebook is a Microsoft of social networks. As long as people are on Facebook (willing to use Windows), applications are fine (application.exe are fine).
Google OpenSocial is a … no, it is not a Mac. It’s Linux. Open ( it’s even called open! ), container independent, not-so-evil as proprietary competitors. A lot of hype around it, a lot of flag waving and so on. But not so many real users and certainly not so many developers. But a lot of quality PR.
Classical example. Everyone will get a market share and probably Google will eventually get it all as Google usually do. But today Facebook and Bebo broke the rules of the game. Facebook licensed its platform to be used on other social network sites.
Maybe Facebook is not like Microsoft after all?
Network information search has a short but exciting history. Let’s look at some trendsetters and heroes of search and try to see where this whole thing is going.
1) 1990 - Archie . Created by a few students at McGuill University in Montreal and designed to search for scientific documents. Archie was originally a local tool that grew to become network services based on FTP protocol. It has a trawler, index database and a search interface. Important limitation - it could only search for document titles.
Actually, you can still check it out. There is one that takes your search query and returns the list of results via e-mail. Neat!
![[Archie picture]](http://www.bratku.com/custom-images/search-history/archie.jpg)
Continue reading ‘A brief history of search’
Promises Plaxo Chief Platfrom Architect Joseph Smarr. Plaxo is having an exciting romance with OpenSocial, boasting an impressive rise in connections number since OpenSocial introduction on 31st of October.
This is of course is pure announcement hype since non of OpenSocial partners has managed to produce any significant value to their users.Not yet that is.
Or put differently, what value will one user bring to a social network itself or to a third-party application running on a social network platfrom?
Take Facebook – Adonomics evaluation renders an active user value at $270. This is how much value user brings to Facebook itself.
It is a bit more difficult with third-party applications running on social network platform. I have seen different views generally ranging from $0.30 to $1.
What do you think?
