MySpace Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Stay N Alive

Announcing OpensocialNow.com – OpenSocial News and Reviews

OpenSocialNow.comI’m proud to announce a new website I’ve been working on.  You may have heard me Twitter about it a few times.  The site is called OpensocialNow!, and will be your source for OpenSocial News, Reviews, and info.  We’ll cover the Orkut launch, the Myspace launch, Hi5, and LinkedIn, as well as general things you can do with OpenSocial.  This is the first blog of its kind, and as OpenSocial launches in the next week or two I’m sure you’ll see many more like it.  It’s my hope that you’ll subscribe to the site via rss and make it your Official source for all things related to the popular social networking platform, OpenSocial.  You can read more about it right on the website here:

http://opensocialnow.com/2008/02/26/welcome-to-opensocialnow/

Oh, and stay tuned to OpensocialNow.com.  I have one more big announcement about a change in the OpenSocial launch coming up tonight!

Amazon, the Social Network?

Did you know Amazon has a Social Network?  In fact, it’s pretty robust!  In Amazon, if you click “(your name)’s Amazon”, then “Your Profile”, you have the option to set up a profile, including a biography, information about yourself, and get this – a list of all your friends currently on Amazon.com. It can show your recent purchases, your favorite items, your wish list, and more. It even gives you a blog in which you can send messages to those that are friends with you. You can also import your own blog’s rss into the blog feed. Amazon has even MySpace beat, with an activity feed of recent activity by your friends.

The real power comes for authors. As an author, I can have people add me as a friend, and I can keep an open dialog with my readers. I can introduce deals, notify when new editions of the book are released, and more. You can see my favorite books, movies, and music, my wishlist, and my biography. You can also see the other books I have written. Amazon also lets you verify through a publisher or agent that a book was written by you, so your books on Amazon can link back to your profile.

Amazon has quite a tool here that I wouldn’t put past them building on in the future. If you think the MySpace OpenSocial announcement was big, imagine if Amazon were to embrace an API such as OpenSocial. In the USA alone, Amazon has over 60 million members in its network. Each one of those members is tied to a bank account of some sort and has probably bought something at some point from the site. Add to that the existing APIs Amazon provides, allowing users to query the Amazon database, associate affiliate IDs and sell items based on commission, Amazon could have the first proven revenue model for a Social Network.

Amazon and Google aren’t the best of friends. Would Amazon embrace Google’s OpenSocial, or create their own as they have through Amazon AWS? Visit my Profile and add me as a friend on Amazon!:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1NYWKPQAI1F5R

Jesse Stay's Amazon Profile

The Power of the Small Community

It used to be, one could make a deal on just a handshake.  People could leave their doors unlocked on their homes and their cars without worry of break in.  A man’s word was his bond.  Everyone knew everyone, by name.

This wasn’t the world I grew up in, but I’m told by my Grandparents, and I’ve seen stories of ancestors where this was, at one time, the way things were done in the world.  We just trusted each other back then.

You see, back then, communities were much smaller.  In the days when trust was in its prime, everyone did know each other by name, because they could know each other by name.  Communities were much smaller back then and accommodated this lifestyle much easier.  Crime was much harder to commit because everyone in the town knew you, and you knew them.  Think, the Scarlet Letter – the worst punishment of that time was shame.  There was no anonymity.  There was no privacy.

Sound familiar?  We are quickly overcoming the bonds of large society which put us in this untrustworthy time to live.  The internet came at a time when society wasn’t ready to be exposed.  People enjoyed their anonymity and their sheltered lives.  They were used to contracts, and handshakes never meant what they used to.  Society fought the internet, and it appears, finally, the internet is fighting back.

Social Media is bringing back an era which we thought we would never see again.  People are being held responsible for their actions online, and again, communities are getting much smaller.   Now, circles of friends can virtually know everything about each other, know each other by name, and start to trust each other again.

I argue, the lack of privacy in Social Media is a good thing.  When you know who your friends are, you can build trust with them again.  Contracts are no longer necessary, and back is the handshake and word as a bond.  Small Community has been re-architected through a virtual means which no one saw coming.

Now, imagine the cell phone, when virtual lives become melded with real life.  Virtual “small communities” become real, and back again is the small town, weaved into the fabric of a very large Society.  Social Media is bringing back the days when man could actually trust one another!

Google Announces Go-Live Date for Orkut

It appears I spoke too soon.  About 5 minutes ago Google announced Orkut will launch their applications to all users the last week in February.  I was close – an announcement was made, and they will be launching OpenSocial 0.7 tomorrow, the same day MySpace opens to developers.  In essence, OpenSocial is going live tomorrow.  It just won’t be visible to the public until the last week in February.  It appears, as I said, Google had to have the last word.

Expect Big Things From Google Tomorrow

Google OpenSocialAs I mentioned earlier, I think the MySpace launch is way bigger than just MySpace.  Watch carefully tomorrow.  There have been several announcements at Google that hint that you may just see Orkut go live tomorrow as well.  From the Release Notes for the latest version of OpenSocial (0.7), under Orkut container update:

 “Close for gadget whitelist submission Feb 5”

I’m not quite sure what this fully means, other than it looks like things are finishing up for Orkut tomorrow.  Also, today Google released a blog post, of which they stated:

The best news is that, based on numerous discussions with both app developers as well as container sites, we believe OpenSocial 0.7 has all the necessary pieces to launch OpenSocial apps to users at scale. In fact, both hi5 and orkut will be using OpenSocial 0.7 for their upcoming user-facing launches.

On the mailing list today (just 6 hours ago), an Orkut developer stated:

We haven’t pushed v0.7 yet, but we’re planning to do it soon.  In the
meantime, use feature=”opensocial-0.6″ and I’ll post when v0.7 is
live.

It’s looking like 0.7 is soon to go live “soon”, and will more than likely with it, make it very possible for sites like Orkut who have been in testing for so long to go live with it (rather than just a developer sandbox like it has now).  MySpace itself will release in a sandbox for about a month on it (I just got word MySpace has officially launched to developers).  Is Orkut getting ready to do a one-up on MySpace tomorrow?

MySpace Announces Developer Platform, OpenSocial to Leave Beta Feb. 5?

Myspace developer platformTonight, MySpace released a signup to enter their development platform. Mashable is reporting that the Platform will go live February 5, and will support OpenSocial from day 1. The MySpace Platform is also rumored to provide revenue sharing options for developers, perhaps providing a solution to the ad sharing networks becoming so rampant on Facebook today.

However, I think the really big news is that MySpace is talking about actually launching their platform on February 5. I have yet to hear that it will be a beta like all the other networks currently. OpenSocial is currently at version 0.7, so that means they are nearing production. Does this mean OpenSocial will officially be out of beta by February 5? I think this could very well be the case, and possibly the reason for MySpace’s late entry – expect this to happen very soon.