MySpace on Thursday raised the stakes in the battle to blunt Facebook, its fast-growing social networking rival, as it joined a Google-led alliance intended to make it easier for web developers to create features that work across a wide variety of social networks.
With rival networking site Bebo also joining the alliance, which was first announced by Google and a handful of smaller players on Wednesday, the new grouping claimed members that have more than 200m internet users between them, compared to the 51m users of Facebook.
The move pointed to an acceleration of the realignment that had already been under way among some of the internet’s biggest powers as social networking has risen in importance, according to observers.
“In the short term, you could view it as Google and MySpace on the one hand, and Microsoft and Facebook on the other,” said Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner, pointing to Microsoft’s advertising partnership and recent investment in Facebook. “There are others yet to weigh in,” he added, including internet giants such as Yahoo!, Ebay and Amazon, all of which maintain a certain amount of “social” data on their users.
Facebook has become the focus of intense Silicon Valley buzz since it opened its site to outside developers in May. That move sparked a flurry of interest as professional and amateur developers raced to build new features that took advantage of the connections between users on the Facebook site.
However, Facebook uses its own proprietary technology for this purpose, meaning that applications written for its site cannot be used elsewhere on the Web. That contrasts with Google’s new OpenSocial technology, which seeks to establish a standard that can be applied across any network that uses it.
Chris DeWolfe, chief executive officer of MySpace, denied that the decision to join the Google coalition had been prompted by a need to counter the recent rise of Facebook. Instead, he said it had been under discussion for a year, and was “just a natural extension of the open approach we’ve had since we started”. He called OpenSocial a new “de facto standard” that would make life easier for developers.
Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, added that the emergence of rival technologies was not likely to result in a “Balkanisation” of the internet around different technology platforms.
“The history of the web says that is not the way it will happen,” he said. “History says that the [open] internet wins.”
Google executives refused to say if they were in discussions with Facebook over OpenSocial, but confirmed that they had made approaches to all the significant internet companies.
“One of the most important things about openness is that anyone is invited to join,” said Mr Schmidt.
