The big news in the developer and social networking worlds is Google’s Open Social. Reading Marc Anderssen post, my radar beeped excitedly:
Open Social — by making this exact same kind of opportunity available to any other social network or container and every app developer and site on the web, in an open and compatible way — will prevent Facebook from having any kind of long-term proprietary developer lock-in. Developers will easily write to both Facebook and Open Social, and have every reason to do so — in fact, 100+ million reasons to do so.
If you’re Facebook, you’d probably prefer to have that proprietary lock-in, and so this announcement may not make you that happy. However, all is not bad for Facebook, because a big part of what’s happening today is market expansion, and Open Social will definitely help fuel market expansion, which is in everyone’s interest, including Facebook’s.
This is the same direction VRM is taking. Soon any lock-in online will have the same chance of survival as the proverbial snowball in hell. It will not happen at once, there is much huffing and puffing from those whose business models and industries are predicated on being able to herd and keep ‘consumers’ in their proprietary pens. Looking forward to the chicken run.
Bonus link: Free customers make free markets
Roland Turner
on Nov 2nd, 2007
@ 6:15 am:
Hi Adriana,
thanks for this (connecting Open Social and VRM); I’ve _finally_ gotten my head around a possible shape for feasible VRM tools.
Interesting.
- Raz