Be kind to your Web 2-footed friend
Google’s announcement on its Open Social blog of an iGoogle sandbox for OpenSocial developers signals its intention to turn the home page into a social network.
The facility supports OpenSocial 0.7, including friends and activity streams as well as a home and canvas view of gadgets. Support is promised for the requestSendMessage function, to facilitate gadget growth.
It makes sense, and where Google leads, the rest are sure to follow. Start pages are already sticky, and contain many useful applications.
Facebook and MySpace had to build from scratch, and the only surprise is that the big boys took so long to get into the social network sand box with them.
Having done so, iGoogle could pose an immediate threat to Facebook because, as it points out on the Google code blog, it already has tens of millions of users.
Where MySpace and Yahoo!, partners with Google in the OpenSocial project, fit into all this would be interesting to know.
