The giants won the 'cake' of the social network

Profitable profits from social networking websites are attracting "giants" to provide advertising services, leading to a trend of cooperation to promote development.

Social network service provider (*) MySpace has officially participated in Google's openSocial social networking community, creating the power to compete with other competitors. The main goal is still to confront the link between Microsoft and Facebook.

MySpace "paired up" with Google against Facebook and Microsoft

Without losing the " delicious cake " after Microsoft signed an advertising contract with Facebook, Google immediately began to work with MySpace, the leading social networking service provider, through a worthwhile advertising contract. 900 million USD.

Microsoft was too lucky in this "predestined" situation with Facebook when "dowry" of 1.6% of social networking website belonged to Microsoft. The 300 employees currently working for Facebook are likely to increase to 700 next year as expected by the CEO and co-founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said.

Another factor showed that Microsoft did not choose the wrong partner when the number of Facebook account holders now reached 250,000 people per day, up 181% in the period from May 2006 to May 5, 2007. Increasing the total number of members to 27 million compared to MySpace is 60 million.

Facebook is gradually becoming the biggest competitor and many experts say it will take over MySpace's rankings in the coming time, although the number of visitors is still far below that of the seniors. According to internet research firm comScore, in June this year, MySpace had 114.1 million visits from users around the world, while Facebook only reached 52.2 million. Hi5 ranked 3rd with 28.2 million, while Friendster and Orkut (*) shared 4th and 5th with 24.7 million and 24.1 million visits respectively.

Social network: Open or not?

Social networks are becoming a virtual life of many Internet residents today.

The story is not over when Microsoft is conducting a discussion to combine the Windows Live ID user authentication system with the Facebook social network service. Meanwhile, MySpace seeks allies through its participation in the Google OpenSocial API (Application Programming Interface platform), a common platform for social-based applications. Both Oracle, Salesforce.com, Hi5, iLike, LinkedIn, Slide, Ning, Friendster, Six Apart and PlaxoBebo also participated in OpenSocial.

In May this year, Facebook took the pioneering step when it truly "opened its home", allowing third-party developers to create mini-applications, which can be applied to user accounts. Facebook wants to become an operating system for social networks. The number of applications for Facebook users jumped to 7000, surpassing MySpace.

However, Facebook's competitors like MySpace and Bebo also participate in the OpenSocial common platform, bringing two-way benefits. This means that OpenSocial members will be able to use a lot of integrated applications from third-party developers and they just need to focus on developing a single API platform for all. Social networks in OpenSocial, not single development for each individual social network.

Independent development or convergence into application sharing groups is flawed. The downside of Facebook is forcing application developers to use its proprietary FBML language, while Google exploits HTML and Javascript. In contrast, social networking sites that participate in the open platform of Google OpenSocial will not have any advantage over other networks in the same group because they share the same applications from third parties.

In general, there is no specific data on the size of the application market for social networks, the profit from this market is increasing rapidly and the number of users increases exponentially. New faces like Slide and iLike are attracting millions of registered user accounts. The social networking land is still full of potential, although according to experts, it is likely that it will regress in five years but it is only a guess.

What one can predict in the near future is the intense confrontation and victory of all four companies: Google, Microsoft, MySpace and Facebook. They will create more advanced social networks, more outstanding features on the web 2.0 platform. Finally, the user, the main object inherits the party of new features and technologies, and just makes the choice of the appropriate service for himself.

(*) Social Network: social networking websites such as MySpace, FaceBook, Yahoo! Mash, Hi5 .
Orkut: Google's social networking service.
Reference information: PCWORLD, BetaNews, New4Hack, PCAdvisor .

Thanh Truc