OpenSocial and the Mark
The word "mark" has a number of discrete meanings. Tonight in my entrepreneurship class we'll be talking about "mark" as in "trademark", a distinct symbol used to identify the source of goods or services. However, in the trade-speak of, say carnies and pro wrestling, the word "mark" means something entirely different, denoting consumers clueless as to how they're being played.
It's this latter sense of the word that comes to mind as I see the nonprofit and social enterprise communities react to the latest PR regarding the OpenSocial Foundation, the Google-MySpace-Yahoo nonprofit promoting an open API for online social networks. For the do-gooder community, this is a Moment of Affirmation--Nonprofit! Hybrid! Open Source! Information Revolution! It's a party with everything except dancing Ewoks, although I expect someone to create a .gif of that soon enough.
And that's exactly what the big three expected and wanted us to do. The fact is, OpenSocial is a deliberate attempt to leverage the cultural biases of the online community against Facebook and Microsoft, not to mention online social networks popular outside the U.S. Social networks, while popular, have proven somewhat difficult to commodify. The Foundation serves as a means to stigmatize the competition by branding it as closed and commercial, even as Google-MySpace-Yahoo leverage their own considerable market resources to profit from the work.
Mind you, I'm not criticizing GMY for doing this--it's rather savvy, and were I in management at any of these companies I'd recommend doing the same thing. I respect the strategy in the same way I do the marketing genius of PT Barnum and Vince McMahon, both of whom used cultural psychology to build entertainment empires.
I'm less enthused about our own recurring tendency to drink the latest Kool-Aid ladled to us in the name of higher good. Social enterprise is supposed to be a movement characterized by business savvy, but time and again we're all-too-eager to imbue someone else's tactics with our own moral hue.
This isn't a sign that we're sophisticated; it marks us as rubes.
It's this latter sense of the word that comes to mind as I see the nonprofit and social enterprise communities react to the latest PR regarding the OpenSocial Foundation, the Google-MySpace-Yahoo nonprofit promoting an open API for online social networks. For the do-gooder community, this is a Moment of Affirmation--Nonprofit! Hybrid! Open Source! Information Revolution! It's a party with everything except dancing Ewoks, although I expect someone to create a .gif of that soon enough.
And that's exactly what the big three expected and wanted us to do. The fact is, OpenSocial is a deliberate attempt to leverage the cultural biases of the online community against Facebook and Microsoft, not to mention online social networks popular outside the U.S. Social networks, while popular, have proven somewhat difficult to commodify. The Foundation serves as a means to stigmatize the competition by branding it as closed and commercial, even as Google-MySpace-Yahoo leverage their own considerable market resources to profit from the work.
Mind you, I'm not criticizing GMY for doing this--it's rather savvy, and were I in management at any of these companies I'd recommend doing the same thing. I respect the strategy in the same way I do the marketing genius of PT Barnum and Vince McMahon, both of whom used cultural psychology to build entertainment empires.
I'm less enthused about our own recurring tendency to drink the latest Kool-Aid ladled to us in the name of higher good. Social enterprise is supposed to be a movement characterized by business savvy, but time and again we're all-too-eager to imbue someone else's tactics with our own moral hue.
This isn't a sign that we're sophisticated; it marks us as rubes.
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Yeah, I feel the same way. I don't think there's any need for celebratory text concerning the uniting of Google, MySpace and Yahoo vs. Facebook. From the point of view of this technologist, there are difficulties not just in commoditizing social networks but in programming an interface like the one they're purporting to create.
Crudely put, the code they've got doesn't work well yet and it's difficult to make it work in the different environments the code is supposed to work in.
What I don't understand is why this is considered an example of Foundation 2.0. This is much like calling a trade association a foundation. Folks, it's just some code they want to push. How is this different from IEEE or ACM or W3C? Those who have been pushing this are just tech rubes.
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