Widgets that run inside your favorite social network are not just fun toys for your amusement, they're also one of the fastest growing cottage industries on the net. And Google's coming OpenSocial platform promises to jump start the industry with a massively expanded market for social network applications.
Max Levchin CEO of Slide, which builds applications for Facebook and other social networks, and is poised to jump onto the OpenSocial bandwagon, likens the current market to the video game market when Pong arrived.
Levchin bristled a little when I suggested that most Facebook widgets are little more than toys. “I wouldn't say these are toys, you look at something like Pong now and it compares poorly with what we have today, but at the time it was like a nuclear bomb in the gaming industry.”
Are you ready to play Quake in Facebook? “Right now you look at Facebook there just isn't that sophisticated,” admits Levchin, “there's years of development before we see like Quake in social networks, but that's where this is going.”
Ultimately, while at the moment the emphasis is on developers, Levchin thinks that OpenSocial will bring more opportunities to your favorite network. “I think the beneficiaries are potential users, especially people in social networks that did not have platforms.”
With Google's new tools smaller social networking site and niche offerings suddenly have an easier way to offer users the same tools as the big boys. Provided, as Levchin says, “they choose to implement these standards.”
Sharam Shirazi the new CEO of Fotoflexer agrees. Fotoflexer, which is a standalone site for editing your photos that offers many of the features of Photoshop (including the “intelligent resizing” tools we've raved about before on Compiler) believes that the future of social network applications is not toys like “Super Wall,” but “full fledged apps, not just widgets.”
Fotoflexer is in a good position to take advantage of a more sophisticated application platform. Sharazi says the company has code ready to ship and hopes to bring photo editing tools to your favorite social network site just as soon as those sites roll out support for Google's platform (Fotoflexer already supports Facebook, Flickr, MySpace Yahoo and more).
Soon, says Shirazi, a user on any platform will be able to “call up the Fotoflexer app and use it just as they would the .com site — edit, save and everything else — all within the social network.”
So does this mean the death of destination websites like Fotoflexer.com? Shirazi doesn't think so in Fotoflexer's case, but agrees that for smaller offerings “there may not be a real need for a website.”
See Also:
- Google Cracks Open The World Of Social Networks
- What Can Users Expect From OpenSocial?
- John McCrea Of Plaxo Talks About Google's OpenSocial Platform
- The Next Social Network? It's Web 2.0, And It Knows Where You Are
- A Slap In The Facebook Follow-up
- Brad Fitzpatrick, The Creator Of LiveJournal, On The Long Road To Open Social Networks
