The Google Platform Launches Thursday? Nope!

According to Mike Arrington, Google will be launching their new platform "OpenSocial," this Thursday. Both Mike and myself had been hearing rumors that the platform would be delayed and that it wouldn't be launching until December 1st. Apparently we all got it wrong (somewhat strange given that I spoke directly with multiple platform partners). According to Mike's post, the new platform will allow users to transfer information across platforms in regards to profile data, friend data and activities. So what platforms will developers be able to build for? Well Mike says that it will be "Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle." Oracle? I didn't realize they have a social network and Salesforce isn't exactly a system built for friending people, only listing your sales leads and contacts. Perhaps I am the only one confused here. Whatever the case, much of this story makes sense based on the fact that the competing platforms are looking to take on Facebook directly. According to the CTO of Hi5, who I spoke with less than a few weeks ago, their platform won't be launching for 12 to 18 months. OpenSocial is apparently a set of standards that all platforms will be able to integrate with but ultimately I see this as only an announcement, not the actual ability to develop for all the platforms. If all developers are suddenly capable of developing for all of these platforms starting Thursday it will be revolutionary. There is no way that this is happening though. As I said yesterday, Google will announce the platform on November 1st and not November 7th or 8th as Techcrunch previously posted. The actual platform will officially launch on December 1st. Call me a skeptic but I'm calling Mike's bluff on this one. This is not the official launch, it is just their announcement. Sorry! While the API will be listed, developers will not be able to integrate with all of these platforms immediately as they will most likely be rolled out over the coming months. The first of which will launch December 1st. Update After reading Marc Andreessen's post which one of my readers pointed out to me, I still come to the same conclusion. While Google may release their set of APIs, as Marc says "Open Social is not quite ready to go live on Ning and the other partners. The API has to stabilize a bit, and containers have to finish testing and validating their implementations." Perhaps Google also likes to call this a launch as well. There may be a rapid release of the new platform but I don't see this happing on Thursday. Call me crazy. I'm putting myself out there and may just end up eating my own words. Oh well!

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The Google Platform Launches Thursday? Nope!

Nick O'Neill

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Nick O'Neill