Has Facebook Met Its Match?

Tech Bloggers Weigh In

Posted by Abbey Klaassen on 11.02.07 @ 10:45 AM

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington and Erick Schoenfeld go head-to-head over whether the Google-MySpace cartel OpenSocial, meant to create open standards for social network applications, is enough to take darling-of-the-moment Facebook. Arrington questions whether the move is a checkmate in the social network space while Schoenfeld points out that "no actual consumers have changed their social networking habits because of OpenSocial." (It should also be noted that the combined audiences of OpenSocial members is several times that of Facebook's.)

Organic's ThreeMinds weighs in on the impact of OpenSocial as well: "We tend to think of widgets as toys that live inside a particular social network (throwing a sheep at someone on Facebook), but the advent of open standards will mean an opportunity to applify all kinds of content." And Deep Focus's Ian Schafer thinks it's equally big news.

It's hard to know what's hype and what's real these days, with the rapid pace of innovation and announcements in the digital world -- not to mention the fickleness of early adopting youth and technophiles. Bottom line: OpenSocial is big news for developers -- and makes things much easier for those marketers using widgets to distribute a message. But whether it shifts audience habits (and oh yeah, it's audiences marketers are after) remains to be seen.