Google fired a shot across the bow of serious proportions, with the rushed announcement of its’ platform approach to social apps. It was an intriguing, smart move. Instead of the obvious move of just taking their mediocre Orkut network, and putting Google muscle behind it, it also chose to align with (and lead) other social networks in support of a an open social api. NY Times coverage here.
An open model was always the holy grail, and developers have been concerned over the diffusion of effort to maintain and distribute into multiple networks - on the surface this begins to solve this challenge. The appeal is obvious to “second tier” networks, which at announcement includes LinkedIn, Ning, Plaxo, Friendster, Oracle and Salesforce.
