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Open social platform… bigger than Ben hur?

I heard the Google API was coming out soon. But this is way bigger than I was expecting, I was expecting big. But I was expecting iGoogle + Orkut big, not every Social network that doesn’t hold a grudge big… Orkut and Hi5 have massive latin american communities… and pretty modest ‘western’ communities. Bebo is basically the UK, MySpace is basically USA and Facebook is largely university students (thats college in the USA), but Facebook is also the major social network for Australia, NZ, essentially bridging the holes left by Bebo and MySpace and doing a pretty good job of making that the smarter business decision.

But what I’m getting at is the community of Hi5 and Orkut combines will also compete in this niche and their latin american user base is already massive. They also have strong european support. That makes the open social platform massive. If it includes linkedIn, then it also includes a lot of corporate users.

The platform was always going to make the web platform widget industry bigger and stronger. But this is also going to open the ability of these widgets to span markets and possibly build stand-alone applications that sit on users or business websites. Perhaps even building niche social networks based on the social networks already available. Good bye facebook, it has been fun, you helped me find many of my old friends, but your time is almost up, something new has come along.

Update: TechCrunch also has some good stuf on the topic of the use of the API

Last 5 posts by james

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