When Google launched it OpenSocial plan in last year, Tianji.com is the only one from China on the partners list. But we did not hear any news on Tianji’s OpenSocial development. Now CityIn.com, an emerging SNS, announced its OpenSocial-based developer platform, more details can be found here.
However, I’m somewhat skeptical on CityIn’s initiative to adopt OpenSocial at this stage, considering CityIn is still very young, just launched in March, and there is no or few existing Chinese OpenSocial apps in the market. Since CityIn’s user base is quite small now, developers will have no incentives to develop apps on the platform.
CityIn tries to deal with this problem by helping global widget developers to localize their applications, and is talking with some developers privately already. Yes, it is helpful, but only solves part of the problem. We need a big player in China’s SNS market to promote OpenSocial, but I don’t expect big SNS sites in China, such as QQ, 51.com and Baidu Space, will join OpenSocial in near future. Fortunately, we still have MySpace China.
As a key partner of OpenSocial globally, Myspace.com has rolled out the first batch of apps already. In China, MySpace.cn also announced its OpenSocial-based developer platform (MDP) in January 2008, and recently MySpace.cn just launched a MDP apps competition to promote its open platform.
To benefit from user base of MySpace China(anyone knows how big it is?) , we can expect that either foreign language apps will release Chinese version, or more Chinese local startups will start to work on an OpenSocial-compatible widgets, which in turn will benefit other SNS sites with OpenSocial supports, as CityIn.