Musings on personal and enterprise technology (of potential interest to professional technoids and others)

Thursday, November 8, 2007

Why Google Turned Into a Social Butterfly - New York Times

This article in the NYTimes is ancient history in web time (almost 2 whole weeks ago ;-), yet it still seems worth a quick peek-
Clearly, Google has demonstrated again that it is not at all afraid to aim high, and contemplate a game-changing approach. This idea seems like the Open Source approach on steroids. An enjoyable and informative summary of the recent drama among Facebook, Microsoft, and Google, in this article:

Why Google Turned Into a Social Butterfly - New York Times: "...In a bravura switch of strategy, Google left its own island to embrace open standards that belong to no one company. Its initiative, which it calls OpenSocial, is an appeal to software developers and Web sites to cooperate in adopting a single set of software standards for the little software widgets that can add a social-networking layer to all Web sites. Agreement on a standard would save users from the aggravation of joining multiple networks and save developers from the aggravation of writing code that works only with specific sites. Unlike Facebook’s programming requirements, Google’s use nonproprietary programming languages...."

PS - A fellow blogger has written about the interesting business question of how facebook can help with marketing campaigns . For the time being facebook may be the best tool for that. In the future, depending how the Google OpenSocial initiative turns out, any number of alternatives may present themselves as well.

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