Who’s the TRUE owner of Facebook, MySpace et al? Is it Google vs the rest?

 

So, it finally happened. I mean the OpenSocial project. By the way, can anyone explain to me what Oracle is doing there?

Okay then, to another saga… Dune by Frank Herbert… Where zensunni Fremen wisdom says: “He who can destroy the thing is the thing’s True Owner”

Looks like me and the Google guys have some favorite books in common As this seems to be the philosophy of the G’s.

Anyway… The user will definitely benefit - Google is very kind to their users (unless they want more privacy).

Will OpenSocial rule the party completely - I think not. Take gmail - it IS a better service than y! or hotmail, it IS more open and it IS more useable. But it IS NOT more popular. Maybe because it was launched long after the rivals? but gmail offers a very easy way to migrate without changing the email address and many other nice little things… And still they are way behind yahoo and hotmail…

Will the same happen to OpenSocial? My bet – most facebook and myspace users won’t abandon their profiles – never. They enjoy their walled gardens and don’t care about ad pressure – they have fun. So FB et al will launch more apps once again to show us “how open the platform actually is”, they will do their best to make the ads less irritating and more targeted (which is, in my opinion more of a good than of an evil thing).

But Google has the greatest power – somehow they manage to be innovative without actually innovating. Yes, they can afford sitting on a beautiful hill and watching us tearing our asses into pieces to bring something new to the people. And then taking it from us and calling it their own move. Because they are the True Owners – they can destroy.

That’s why I like Zuckerberg and company – they are their own owners and they fight and they win sometimes.

Also, we are missing an important thing that Alexander Van Elsas once started to talk about – social networks will evolve into something principally new. Some day. A browser-based social network looks more like a real thing to me, and some steps are already made – check out Flock browser built on the Firefox engine. It claims to let you take your friends wherever you are browsing, to see people who are browsing the same site that you are and so on… And this is just the beginning.

Will the current leaders catch up? Google will, definitely. Others – time will show.