Google to Use OpenSocial to Compete with Rivals

Over the years, Google has gone places, with current trading price of close to $700 a share. The company has made it a habit to overshoot estimates set by Wall Street analysts regarding its performance. Despite all its successes, the company has overlooked one area that is reaping rich rewards today: the social networking scene.

The company has cashed in on the concept of Internet advertising, and is now refining its approach to this form of revenue generation through Internet searches launched by users. Now, Google is looking to advertise based on what the user is searching for. This is very different from the way social networking sites operate, and that is an area the company is now set to target.

Social networking websites such as News Corp.’s MySpace or Facebook use information related to demographics and user taste that users provide them with to place advertisements on user web pages on the network. Google is now gearing up to move into this frontier and develop its own social networking capabilities.

A clear indication of Google’s intentions came on October 30 when the company made a statement announcing the release of OpenSocial, a new Google tool. This new tool would enable programmers to write programs for social networking sites that use this technology.

As of now, the companies that would benefit from this tool would include Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5 Networks, and also Ning. The basic premise for developing OpenSocial would be to generate common specifications for the different sites that would make use of the technology.

A number of companies are expected to help Google during this venture. One such company is Slide, which generates widgets for networking sites such as Facebook, iLike, and also MySpace. The widgets at iLike enable users to check out the musical leanings of other users and also gather information regarding concerts.

Other companies that have expressed an interest in using OpenSocial include Oracle and Salesforce.com. Going forward, the company would make its possible for software programmers to make use of data from other Google applications. These include popular applications such as Gmail and iGoogle, which is a customized home page. The company would also share all revenue it generates with its partners.

Google is planning to use the information relating to the social relationships that users maintain, seen usually in its e-mail and other such related applications to ensure users receive advertising content in sync with the data they provide.

Success in its endeavor would enable Google to provide some competition to its rival in this domain, Facebook. The Google network could possibly retard, to an extent, the phenomenal success and growth that Facebook has been achieving in recent times.

What OpenSocial could achieve would be an open source parallel of the material on websites like Facebook, according to Mark Andreessen, Ning’s co-founder. He was also formerly the man behind Netscape Communications, a tool that was in use in the early days of the Internet.

OpenSocial seems to be the first major step in Google’s plan to beat Facebook and pull it down from its pedestal. Besides, it would be the best possible way to face off against rival Microsoft Corp. The rivalry between the two intensified as Microsoft pulled one over Google by picking up a stake in Facebook for a cool $240 million.