OpenSocial Skepticism from FB Elite
This post includes a fairly epic rant about Google’s back-burnering OpenSocial (at least as of v0.5).
OpenSocial 0.5 is Half-Baked
(FINAL NOTE: To Larry, Sergey and Eric, if you host an FBMeetUp to introduce OpenSocial to a standing room audience of 280+ facebook developers who want to hear the OpenSocial doctrine, it is just common courtesy to stop by for 2 minutes and give the crowd a pep talk from someone that has built a billion dollar company. Bill and Steve have done this for 30+ years at their developer conferences and Mark has done it as his developer garages in Palo Alto (and around the world). I guess everyone will understand if the three of you were working on something more important than OpenSocial. However, since you’re not making OpenSocial a priority with either your treasures or your time, why should a world of developers do so?
My conclusion from your actions is that a headline like “OpenSocial 0.5 is Half-Baked” is what you’d like to see from the press, including Nick O’neil, Justin Smith, Eric Eldon, Brad Stone, Ellen McGirt, Rodney Rumford, Matt Marshall, Nick Wingfield, Vara Vauhini, Kara Swisher, etc.
Calling all Top Facebook Developers: $1 Million Per OpenSocial App
If that is not the case, it is not too late to contact R. Tyler Ballance — TopFriends/Fortune Cookie, Blake Commagere–Vampires/Zombies/Slayers/Causes, David Gentzel — HappyHour/Food Fight, Zach Alia — FreeGifts, Dan Peguine–HonestyBox, Adam Gries–Superlatives, Joe Winterhalter–Quizzes, Lance Tokuda/Jia Shin/Ro Choy–RockYou’s apps, Keith Schacht–Grow-a-Gift/Hatching Eggs, Lev Maxchin/Kevin Rabois–Slide’s apps, Chris van Vleit–WATER FIGHT! and Nasser Gaemi–Birthday Calendar. I’m sure they would each gladly accept $1 million per top 50 facebook app and help the OpenSocial and MySpace development teams get one “Reference Implementation” of OpenSocial right by 12/31/07 instead of 12/31/08 or never. Once the MySpace version of the OpenSocial reference implementation is complete (which is the only container with a current audience large enough for developers to really care about), then the 17 other OpenSocial containers will have a very tight specification to write to and 50 killer apps to test their container implementations.
Fortune Favors the Bold
Making this bold move might lead to the headline “Google & MySpace Find a $50 Million Solution For Making OpenSocial a Viable Altenative for Developers.” However, I predict Google and MySpace won’t do this but will instead think they can beat Facebook with half-measures. They are wrong. And this mistake, will ultimately lead to Microsoft/Facebook winning not only the Social Operating System war but also the Online Advertising war.)
(c) 2007 Altura Ventures, LLC.
Okay… so these developers don’t care about OpenSocial, according to Lee? Sweet! Who needs competition anyway?!?