Roll over Facebook......

Google has finally dropped the other shoe and released details of its long heralded Open Social network platform. Marc Andreesson (who Mosaic'd the AOL Closed Gardens last time round) sums it up pretty well:

This is the exact same concept as the Facebook platform, with two huge differences:

With the Facebook platform, only Facebook itself can be a "container" -- "apps" can only run within Facebook itself. In contrast, with Open Social, any social network can be an Open Social container and allow Open Social apps to run within it.

With the Facebook platform, app developers build to Facebook-proprietary languages and APIs such as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) -- those languages and APIs don't work anywhere other than Facebook -- and then the apps can only run within Facebook. In contrast, with Open Social, app developers can build to standard HTML and Javascript, and their apps can then run in any Open Social container.

Though Ning is not fully open either, of course, but maybe this move will change it - after all, in Web 1.0 eventually everyone got the message that users wanted open platforms and for people to compete on services - this is tacit admission that SocNets are part of the platform.

The Google platform is not in itself truly open of course - its more a Microsoft "de facto" standard play than an open standard play, as Dave Winer notes (Why is it that Dave is usually the tech A lister who has the bottle to call these things?) but I live in hope that, as in Web 1.0 when Sun, MSFT etc got off their high horses to make the Web interwork, all these players will collaborate)

Not entirely great news for Facebook - as we have noted many times before, historically SocNets have a life of about 18 months before the Shiny New One appears and all the Cool School flock off to it.

Well, here it is, or the next iteration anyway....wonder what Facebook's current valuation of $15bn will be in 6 months time - will they be the Pointcast of Web 2.0?

I don't think it will be that bad....the analogy with AOL et al in the mid 90's on seems closer to me, but if you look at our piece on Facebook valuation, the assumptions you need to make for it to "grow into" a $15bn valuation have just got harder to believe.

(Update...just got worse for Facebook...MySpace and Bebo are weighing in on the Google Platform (see Grauniad here. Open annd Big means one can be politically correct (Open Systems) and make money too - Bright New Shiny Thing, here we all come....).