Google Becomes the Web’s Social Toll Booth

In my opinion, Google’s new OpenSocial initiative is game, set and match against the walled garden of Facebook.

Thursday, an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning.

The strategy is aimed at one-upping Facebook, which last spring opened its service to outside developers. Since then, more than 5,000 small programs have been built to run on the Facebook site, and some have been adopted by millions of the site’s users. Most of those programs tap into connections among Facebook friends and spread themselves through those connections, as well as through a “news feed” that alerts Facebook users about what their friends are doing.

TechCrunch has more:

The timing of OpenSocial couldn’t be better. Developers have been complaining non stop about the costs of learning yet another markup launguage for every new social network platform, and taking developer time in creating and maintaining the code. Someone had to build a system to streamline this (as we said in the last few sentences in this post). And Facebook-fear has clearly driven good partners to side with Google. Developers will immediately start building on these APIs to get distribution across the impressive list of hosts above.

What is remarkable here is that Google is not going to “beat” Facebook at the social game by simply building yet another social network (YASN). Instead, Google is out-networking Facebook by opening everything up through API’s. Not only does that make good traffic sense for Google, it also makes good advertising sense.

Like the tollbooths and turnpikes which were popular revenue generators in early American traffic road systems as the country spread west to Pennsylvania and beyond, we’re seeing the web grow beyond it’s once Appalachian bound territory into new regions, including social networking. Google has wisely positioned itself as the toll keepers of these new transit routes with a brilliant play to out-network the supreme social network (and make a ton of money while doing it).

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