Today’s guest post comes to you from Dharmendra Yashovardhan, who is a ardent follower of Indian Internet scene along with being intimately involved with a web2.0 start-up himself.
Quite a few things happened these last few days in the social networking space. While tons have been written about Microsoft valuing Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook at $15 billion , we mostly missed Yahoo’s decision to let go of Yahoo! 360 (though Jerry Yang had hinted at this in his post sometime back).
Now comes the news that Google is launching OpenSocial (the link will go live sometime today). One of the reasons why Facebook is so popular is that it allows developers to build their own applications for the network. Google’s OpenSocial will allow developers to build application which will work across communities (called ‘hosts’, so far Linkedin, hi5, Plaxo, Ning, Orkut, Viadeo, Friendster, Oracle and Salesforce have said ‘yes’).
The OpenSocial system will consist of three common APIs (Profile information, Friend information and Activities). What really differentiates this system from others (e.g. Facebook) is that the developers can use normal JavaScript and html to build their applications. I believe that this could be the next big thing which will allow Google to leverage its own huge user base to build a ‘network of networks’.
When do you think we would see something similar connecting Yaari, iBiBo, Orkut, techTribe and MingleBox in India? What are the possible business models?