Marc Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner and internet pundit extraordinaire, has weighed in on the OpenSocial versus Facebook debate and believes that Google and friends are too late, provided that “Facebook opens their API up further and allows for its use outside the Facebook.com domain.”

Cuban imagines combining Facebook with Yahoo to enable the search engine to take advantage of data, like your Facebook status, as a means to “customize the results according to information culled from your profile.”

As Cuban says, prefacing a search by looking at user’s Facebook mood (in Cuban’s words “what is my search mood today: Information, entertainment, purchasing, bored…”) could be used to provide more useful search results.

Like most things Cuban tend to write, it sounds good, but it ignores as many ideas as it offers.

Continue Reading “OpenSocial Is Doomed: Marc Cuban’s Facebook-Yahoo Mashup Fantasies” »

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.”

Continue Reading “Get Ready For Quake-like Sophistication In Your Favorite Social Network Apps” »

Web application developers are in a tizzy over Google’s impending announcement of an open social network platform. In conjunction with what Google terms “host” networks like LinkedIn, Friendster and Plaxo, Google is offering a new platform — the Facebook Platform without Facebook.

But while the developers may be ecstatic about their massive newfound audience potential, what does it mean for the users of social networks like you and I?

For now not much will change, but in the future, as David Jones VP of marketing at Friendster Friendster told me when we spoke yesterday, “developers will be building things that make life easier for users”

As Jones says, “the fact is that you can build an application that uses the [OpenSocial] APIs and then distribute it to many more sites than you could without this platform.” And that means more stuff for users to play with.

Continue Reading “What Can Users Expect From OpenSocial?” »