With Google OpenSocial, Social Networking Online May Grow Up

... to become more of what it used to be.

Social Networking has been with us for a long time.

I remember ... the rush to Friendster, the rush to Orkut, the rush to Ecademy, the rush to LinkedIn (and it's still limited value) .. and I particularly remember reading the last couple of chapters of the 1956 book The Organization Man by William F. Whyte (then publisher of Fortune magazine) in which he described the very active social networking in company towns as a fundamental aspect of corporate and community life in the 50's.

The above represent a few of the reference points in my memory along the path to Facebook's supposed $15 billion valuation (each time I hear that, I have an image come to mind of a PR team at Google just waiting, perhaps holding an internal pool as to when Microsoft would announce it's Facebook investment, and then when it happened rubbing their hands in collective glee and saying to each other "OK, let's go ...").

I don't think there's any mystery here, really.  Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".  Many of their basic products they offer for free, and along the way they have wallpapered, (in a sense) the background with relatively unobtrusive advertising (there's so many wee text ads that we sort-of don't notice them or almost expect them to be there while using an application regardless of their presence, Gmail being a good example).

Google OpenSocial will, I predict, come to be used for all sorts of VPNs (virtual private networks) for one or another purpose. 

The key to social networks and social networking in the future is purpose.  This was evident in foresight, and glaringly so in hindsight.  The first few sorry attempts were all about using the new toy we call the Internet, and the first major wave was about meeting and mating (all the online dating and match-ups) and the next all about finding opportunities and jobs.

I think it is a smart tack on the part of Google to provide the platform and to a large extent let it go ... this is by and large what they do with most of their work.  they let it go whilst they go about organizing and making accessible and useful the world's information whilst also providing the means for bringing other information to peoples' attention through text advertising. 

This will also let users decide and in-form the ways a social networking platform can work for the purpose they have in mind, and it won't depend so much on having 20 million members as opposed to 2,000 members, because it won't be about monetizing them eyeballs ... at least not in the same way.

And that, over time, may lead to honestly new types of business logic with which to inform new business models built on the decks of the social networking platforms of the interconnected age.

Via the Toronto Globe and Mail ...

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Google Opens Up

[ Snip ... ]

The first is called OpenSocial, and it's an attempt by the Web giant to create a kind of platform for social networking – one that would allow users of different networks such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn to move their data from one to the other, and to use applications or services that could draw from all of them.

More than one critic has compared Facebook with a “walled garden” – a social network that wants to keep its users inside the boundaries of its service, in order to control what they can do (and in order to sell advertising aimed at them). This is what you might call the America Online model.

Google's model, however, is closer to the vision expressed by the World Wide Web's creator, Tim Berners-Lee, in a recent blog post. In his commentary, Sir Tim describes his sense of where the Web is going and concludes that it is becoming more social.

In the beginning, he says, the Internet allowed computers to talk together without having to worry about cables or even location. The next revolution was the Web, which allowed documents to be shared without any complicated technology.

The next move, Sir Tim says, is to allow social data to move around and be integrated without any special software, something he says will allow a truly social Web to emerge.

Although Google wants to be the one to bring together companies to create the OpenSocial standard, the Web company isn't interested in controlling the new platform, which is unusual for a large technology company.

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Tags: William F. Whyte, The Organization Man, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, OpenSocial, Matthew Ingram, Jon Husband, wirearchy

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