Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Qloud & iLike Talk OpenSocial

Everyone is talking about OpenSocial, and the music 2.0 services are no exception.

Toby Murdock - CEO, Qloud


Ali Partovi - CEO, iLike


The thing that most immediately strikes me is that iLike, Qloud and MySpace all have their own versions of an "artist page" within the same network. So, now the consumer experience is fragmented. "Did you see my post on 50 Cent's wall?!". "Uh, no. Which wall? The MySpace artist page, the iLike artist page or the Qloud artist page?". The same problem already exists in Facebook.

How does this all shake out?! I don't know yet. Any thoughts?

TechCrunch covers some of the upcoming battle here.

UPDATE: It turns out that Tim O'Reily is a bit disappointed with OpenSocial in general...


OpenSocial: It's the data, stupid: "If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that's a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don't want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I wrote about this a little in the essay I link to below. There I talk about how we are moving to audience activities being increasingly distributed across multiple sites and the problems that raises for audiences and designers (among others):

Baym, N. K. (2007). The new shape of online community: The example of Swedish independent music fandom. First Monday, volume 12, number 8.