Think big and think bigger
Months ago when facebook release their open platform F8, everyone thought it is a brilliant idea and amazed by how big facebook think. They became undoubtably the hottest community. As opposed to other social networks’ relatively closed development platform, facebook’s open platform really caught a lot of eyeballs. And I bet folks in other social networks are pretty jealous about it.
Months later, google showed us what’s called “think bigger”: opensocial, which provide common APIs developers can build their application on top of so it can be used on all social network who accept this framework. With all major social network including myspace/plaxo/hi5/bebo/ning signing up and united together, all of sudden we see an isolated facebook platform sitting there against the whole alliance. And now people started to criticize facebook being not open enough to embrace opensocial.
OpenSocial is a really really smart move either from technology perspective or from business perspective, from technology point of view it provides a unified way for different social network to open themselves. It will bring every social network to the same level on the extensibility and scalability of their platforms, which is a good thing businesswise as well, since it will significantly weaken the advantage of google’s future competitor facebook in its unique open position as apposed to the other social network. Especially Microsoft just announced the huge investment on facebook. Just in time that all the other social network are so afraid of facebook’s move and moving to that direction. It is perfect marketing strategy, perfect timing, great execution, I couldn’t admire more.
All these brought my thoughts about this social-network-platform drama. And for the first time, unfortunately I’m against google.
Though the dotcom bubble has bursted for nearly a decade, in silicon valley most people still believe that with one fresh idea and hard work they can harvest big. It is the basic spirit which is driving the creativity from hundreds of thousands of startup company in silicon valley, and success stories like facebook ( and don’t forget google is also an example) is encouraging the others to keep going. In old times microsoft was playing the role as the dream crasher, it will steal the ideas and integrated into its OS so people has to use their service. However, in the web world you can’t really do it that way. But that doesn’t mean monoply couldn’t be done, and google showed us how it is done by releasing the opensocial and persuade all the major social networks to join. By doing so, developers has to use google’s API to develop their application so their application can be used on these social networks. And what would probably happen is google will take advantage of its in-house APIs and integrated its ad-network into it, just so to expend it ad-network. Doesn’t it ring a bell about how microsoft kicked netscape’s ass or how everybody recognize excel as electronic form and not too many people know lotus used to have a meaning other than flower?
In my not-so-old memories, google used to be like a happy geek, smart, fun, positive, humble, appreciate and embrace every technology revolution. But what I see today is a big brother trying to balance the game so it can grab the control, so it can take advantage of other people’s brilliant idea. what I see today is a big company trying to elaborate its money power to kill its potential opponent.
Maybe facebook will lose this battle and finally choose to join opensocial and become another google’s underdog, or maybe they decided to fight back and keep the battle on, it doesn’t matter, originality is killed anyway by all means.
I’m not saying the whole google opensocial platform is a bad thing and shouldn’t happen, on the opposite I think technically it is a great idea. It’s just like what I learned from the famous PC game “Diablo”, in the end, after having killed the legendary monster, the warrior took the red diamond and become the monster himself. What I was saying was, what we are seeing today is not and will never be the google we used to like, we are looking at another Microsoft now.
PS: thoughts just kept poping up in my brain while I was writing this blog, I tried to keep the whole article in some logic pattern but found it impossible. Bare with me if you are lost reading this piece of blog.