Social networking gets interesting again
November 1st, 2007 by Mr. Nutz
I’ve taken a long hiatus from posting anything here on Worst, mainly because it was just getting boring. MySpace sucked — and still sucks — and nothing exciting was going on in the world of social networking. One can only look at so much glitter text before you start thinking about hijacking a loaded school bus full of teens and veering it off a cliff, just to do what you perceive to be a favor to the Internet. Plus it wears on your soul, just picking on people’s crappy MySpace profiles all the time. A lot of negative energy emanates from my black heart, but not that much.
Things get interesting again
Just over a year ago, I predicted that Facebook would wipe out MySpace. MySpace isn’t gone (yet), but Facebook is suddenly the hot sh*t after it opened its platform to developers, while MySpace remains stagnant and buggy. (If it’s any hint, the biggest source of traffic to Worst of MySpace are the search keywords “myspace errors”).
Before today, I’d said that this was the death knell for MySpace: Facebook gets it, they choose to evolve, MySpace chooses to pull a Friendster. And so things go.
Google gets in the game
But now, in a challenge to Facebook Apps, Google is introducing OpenSocial, which aims to be sort of a meta-platform for creating social networking -based applications (or SNBAs, which is an acronym I just invented).
OpenSocial apps will be able to run almost anywhere, like on this crappy blog, and not just on a social networking page. Already, Google has partnered with companies like LinkedIn, Friendster (ha!), Salesforce and now MySpace; developers will be able to tap into your friend bases on these networks.
Just imagine! Once a Facebook phenomenon, you’ll now be able to “Throw Sheep” at your associates on LinkedIn or Salesforce, too!
The future
The potential is enormous. For a long time, social networking on the Internet has yielded absolutely nothing worth a monkey turd. Now, people are figuring out how to tap into all these superfluous connections we’ve made to actually do something with them. What remains to be seen is if people can build things slightly more awesome than Superpoke.
Worst prediction: The next killer app arises out of OpenSocial in 2008.
As far as this blog is concerned, I’m not ruling out some angle with all the terrible MySpace profiles, but let’s just say it’s not going to be the sole focus anymore.
