The news all around the technosphere is that MySpace has jumped on the OpenSocial standard that Google has put forth, putting yet another major player on Google’s “side”. The other “side” of course being Facebook, who has put together their own set of API’s.
To me the news of the News Corp backed MySpace joining Google’s SuperFriends wasn’t so much news, as the fact that it had also signed up a few other interesting players: Oracle and Salesforce. I say this not because social networks around generally recreational activities aren’t legitimate, but all super-poking applications aside, getting these major B2B2 players on board is a huge issue and perhaps on a completely different order of magnitude than, say, Friendster or Xing.
Now, Oracle and Salesforce both have their own API’s right now, but by joining Google’s OpenSocial standard, it will be even easier for developers to access the data behind these very different kind “social networks” — allowing, perhaps, for applications to be developed in an even quicker or easier way that will be able to pull in data from recreational networks as well as business and professionally related ones.
Yep, all this might usher in a scary world where a single application could access your identity both as a potential sales call under an online CRM piece of software (Salesforce) *and* what you and your buddies were doing at that club thursday night with that other client of theirs (MySpace).


November 1st, 2007 at 6:11 pm | Permalink
as usual the doctor makes the correct diagnosis.
November 2nd, 2007 at 12:39 am | Permalink
I agree that the implications of all the business-related sites are actually more interesting than the social sites. Combining CRM from Salesforce and Oracle with LinkedIn is fascinating to consider.
There are a lot of other interesting combinations possible as well. See my blog for more:
http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/ubiquitous-social-networks-for-business/