How to Make Money Onlinea blog by Sohaib Thiab

Its an exciting weekend thats for sure, after lots of speculation about Google and Myspace’s counter attack to Facebook’s growth and the huge popularity of their apps platform, and after Google wasn’t able to outbid Microsoft for a piece of Facebook, whether they weren’t able to outbid Microsoft or they weren’t that interested because they had OpenSocial up their sleeves remains unknown.

So what is OpenSocial, basically its a gathering of social networks that allows 3rd party developers to get data from these social networks and write applications for them through the use of the common API’s that will be made available for them by OpenSocial.

Myspace is far the largest social network to join the OpenSocial platform, this means that they have neglected he option of building their own platform and opted to use Google’s, which is definitely a good idea since from the looks of it, Facebook and Microsoft are forming a team against Google and the others.

Other “2nd tier social networks” joined the OpenSocial platform including Ning, Linked In, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut and others. Orkut officially announced the launch of their open platform on November 1st making it the 1st website to use and implement OpenSocial.

Techcrunch and the New York times were among the 1st websites o report the rumors about OpenSocial, which later was confirmed by Google, As Google described their new platform by saying, if Facebook is 98% open, OpenSocial will be 100% open.

Data privacy are amongst one of the issues about all of this openness, especially with the news about Facebook’s SocialAds and the targeting of ads based on profile data. Which you can bet your ass Google is planning to do something similar to with all of these networks joining OpenSocial.

Today’s question is, will Fcebook join OpenSocial? or will they take their own path and risk being viewed as an outsider, from the looks of it every other social network is joining OpenSocial, personally I don’t think Facebook will join OpenSocial simply because they already have their own, very successful platform, and there is no reason to join OpenSocial except for the reason mentioned earlier, for the sake of not being viewed as an outsider.

From a webmaster and an internet Entrepreneur’s view, the more social networks join OpenSocial and the more open their platforms are the happier I am, so far I missed the train with Facebook apps but I am planning to get on board, and with large social networks like Myspace opening, the opportunities of cashing out in their platforms are greater.

Technorati Tags: OpenSocial, Socialads, apps, open platform