The Hindu News Update Service
News Update Service Friday, November 2, 2007 : 1245 Hrs Sci. & Tech. Google makes friends with network sites to battle Facebook (GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE) By Jemima Kiss and Richard Wray Google on Thursday night teamed up with MySpace and Bebo to battle against Facebook for a larger share of the booming social networking market. Google has signed up MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, and Bebo, a favourite among teenagers, to its new OpenSocial system, which aims to link together services on some of the most popular websites. It has also signed up business networking service Linkedin, one of Asia's favourite social networks Friendster and its own Orkut network, which is the market leader in Brazil. Google has been searching for ways to counter the phenomenal growth of Facebook and last week lost out on a chance to take a stake in the business. Microsoft secured the 1.6% shareholding in a deal that valued the three-year-old technology firm at $15bn. The OpenSocial network will provide a standard software kit for developers of applications such as games, video players and photo albums, which all sit inside social networks. The kit will allow their applications to work across multiple websites. Facebook has successfully exploited the popularity of applications, not least Scrabulous, an online version of Scrabble. The site offers more than 7,000 tools, mostly built by independent developers and companies, that users can add to their profile pages for free, encouraging them to spend more time on the site and offering a promotional platform that supports other web companies. If users spend more time on a site or return more often it increases the site's potential for advertisers. By opening up part of its code to allow developers to build applications, Facebook stole a march on MySpace, which had banned several widgets from its site. But Facebook applications cannot be used on other sites. Bebo is a favourite of UK teenagers, with an estimated 10.9 million people using the site in the UK every month. It offers applications such as the photo gallery Slide, but the new platform is expected to provide a wave of new applications across Bebo and a dozen other partner sites. Bebo's UK-based president Joanna Shields, who joined the company from Google, described OpenSocial as "a positive step in the right direction". "Developers and social networks have an important, symbiotic relationship, the success of which depends on developers not having to replicate the work they do to bring their innovations in front of the largest possible To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
