OpenSocial

It is a tooth and nail battle out there. A little over a week ago Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.5% stake in facebook.com, the no.1 social networking site in the world. After this news I created a facebook account, to add to my Orkut and Myspace accounts, as if the whole world wants to network with me and read my useless profile PJs. But is it really worth so much. What are these guys fighting over? Are these social networks just mines of demograhic data? Are they answers to unmet customer needs? Or are they just high potential advertisement channels?

Making this fight further interesting, Google chose halloween day to announce to the world its new social networks developer platform called OpenSocial. And not just that, Google already has signed up MySpace, LinkedIn and Friendster into this platform. And news has it that some of facebook developers have also signed up. This battle is getting interesting by the day.

As a hapless user, I just want one social networking profile, totally integrated with all my desktop software and my mobile phone. Google/Microsoft - Are you listening?