White Label Social Networks that support OpenSocial (For 2008)

Categories: Industry Index, OpenSocial, Widget StrategyPosted on March 13th, 2008

If you’re not familiar with OpenSocial, it’s a protocol lead by Google to allow widgets and applications to be portable to any social network or website that part of the alliance. If you’re not familiar read “Explaining OpenSocial to your Executives” to get started, I explain it in pure business terms.

I’m conducting research right now for an upcoming report on OpenSocial, I’ve already interviewed David Glazer and Kevin Marks from Google, and have interviewed Joseph Smarr from Plaxo, Nick O’Neill from All Facebook, and will be talking to David Recordon from Six Apart next week.

I just asked my twitter network, (and received about 20 responses) about which white label social networks are open social compliant, and received quite a few responses. I frequently use social media tools for research ‘discovery’ to quickly find out a multitude of answers, but of course, it’s no substitute for analysis. I’d guess that I use social media tools for 10-20% of all my research, asking, reading, linking, or leaving comments.

The reason why I limit this list for 2008, as I’m pretty sure it will be most of the industry that adopts this standard

‘White Label’ (you can rebrand them) social networks that have adopted or agreed to offer the OpenSocial Protocol

KickApps (read more)
Ning (OpenSocial Directory)
Flux (read more)

So why is this significant?
Soon, corporate websites with social networks will start to host popular applications for other websites, this makes the web distributed. Soon, corporate websites will stop being irrelevant. Development time will be reduced, applications can quickly be rehashed and other opportunities that I’ve found will be in the report.

I expect this list to get quite a bit longer by the end of this year, if you know of others, please leave a comment.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Industry Index, OpenSocial, Widget Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Posted by links for 2008-03-14 | How to Make Your Users Happy on March 14th, 2008 at 5:27 am

Netmodular announced support for the Google OpenSocial APIs the day after they were announced.

OpenSocial will likely take all year to mature, but to my mind - these “Widgets” are not for Poking a girl on your facebook network, they are the humble start of a collaboration explosion. I see a future where creative collaboration widgets use the social graph and the business policy that dictates who can see what, or who can do what in the enterprise.

Since we’ve always been creating Social Networks for business and not for dating or amateur sites, we’ve found the relationship between the widget and the social network to be one of collaboration between business people.

Anyway, Netmodular should certainly be listed! We both understand the technology and we applaud the OpenSocial effort!

Posted by Jesse Tayler on March 14th, 2008 at 9:14 am

I think that a lot of this OpenSocial talk is premature. As early adopters, we (as in those of us that follow social media trends closely) care but I don’t see any real traction in our client base yet.

As the platform transitions to something a little less theoretical I think it will gain a lot of interest from the companies in our space. Until then, I’ll keep on preaching that we have to keep our eyes on the prize: Relevancy over bells and whistles.