Open Social – will it be better than Facebook?

Hot off the press – Marc Andreessen has written a post titled Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web. Google’s brainchild is Open Social, a “new open web API” – and is stronly supported by LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, iLike, Flixster, RockYou, and Slide.

Marc explains that Facebook is a platform, and uses itself as a “container” – so developed applications can only run within Facebook itself. In contrast, Open Social allows any social network to be an Open Social container and allow Open Social application to run within it.

This is really going to put a major shift in the industry. Facebook has made such a huge mark, and business and social networking has so drastically been affected by Facebook.

At Jayz Internet Solutions we’ve begun training business people how to use the social networking site for their business needs. Will we have to dump the course? I doubt it. Although Google has a striking model to challenge Facebook, we’ll have to wait and see what the public adoption is going to be like. I’m all for “openness” – and Google’s model suits “collectiveness” – so I’m excited to see the wave of change about to hit us.

As developments occur you can find them posted here…