Announced today, Google's decision to launch a new set of social networking development tools was impressive from both strategic and timing perspectives. The new tools will provide the developer community with an open standard for writing applications that will work on many different platforms and environments that comprise a much larger user-base than that of Facebook.
From a strategy perspective, Google gains an quick entree into social networking by teaming up with a group of social networking sites that have good reason to be concerned about Facebook. And it will boost Google's existing monetization strategies for relatively little investment. Google's stock price said it all today, so hats off to them.
From a timing perspective, Google's recent interest in Facebook seems only now to have been a good corporate bluff, to make sure that Microsoft followed through with it's investment into Facebook. After all, Google has been working on this for a while, and today's announcement must have taken some of the edge off of Facebook's delight. Perhaps, but perhaps not.
rBlock has two slightly different takes on this whole affair, which I'll elaborate on soon in subsequent postings:
- social networking is a relatively young phenomenon, and companies that are built solely around it (My Space, Facebook, etc.) have yet to prove that they have long-term, sustainable business models;
- the term "social" has been over-used and over-extended in its application to the online world, and really ought to be reigned in. I look forward to drawing some distinctions between the relatively few online models that clearly have a positive net social impact, and the many more out there that do not.
Comments