Google makes friends with network sites to battle Facebook
Jemima Kiss and Richard Wray
The Guardian
Friday November 2 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/nov/02/google

Google last night teamed up with MySpace and Bebo to battle against Facebook for a larger share of the booming social networking market.

Google has signed up MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, and Bebo, a favourite among UK teenagers, to its new OpenSocial system that aims to link services on some of the web's most popular sites. It has also recruited the business networking service Linkedin, one of Asia's favourite social networks Friendster and its own Orkut network, the market leader in Brazil, as it goes head to head with Facebook.

Google has been searching for ways to counter the phenomenal growth of Facebook. Last week it lost out on a chance to take a stake in the business when Microsoft secured a 1.6% shareholding in a deal that valued the three-year old technology firm at $15bn (£7.2bn).
The OpenSocial network will give developers of applications such as games, video players and photo albums that sit on social networks, a standard software kit that will allow their applications to work across multiple websites.

MySpace's co-founder, Chris DeWolfe, said last night: "What we all want is for the web to be a better place, a more interesting place, as more innovation occurs."

Facebook has already exploited the popularity of applications. The site offers more than 7,000 tools, mostly built by independent developers and companies, that users can add to their profile pages for free, encouraging more time to be spent on the site and offering a promotional platform for other web companies.

By opening up part of its code to allow developers to build applications, Facebook stole a march on MySpace.

Mr DeWolfe said yesterday's agreement would create a new "de facto standard" for the development of home-made applications. "We really think the next level of innovation is going to be from deeper application integration."

Bebo has an estimated 10.9 million monthly British users. It will hope that opening its site to the OpenSocial network will encourage more international users and make the site more "sticky". Bebo's UK-based president, Joanna Shields, who joined the company from Google, described OpenSocial as "a positive step in the right direction".

"Developers and social networks have an important, symbiotic relationship, the success of which depends on developers not having to replicate the work they do to bring their innovations in front of the largest possible community