In Google Developer Day 2008 in Beijing in yesterday, Kaifu Lee announced Google’s OpenSocial strategy in China.
In addition to MySpace.cn, CityIn and Tianya.cn, seven other Chinese social networking sites will jointly promote OpenSocial platform on their sites, including Xiaonei, 51.com, Douban, Hainei, Tianji, Yiqi.com and a web-base online casual game website 51wan.com. So both Xiaonei and 51.com, two SNS with large user base, will support OpenSocial standard. All these websites are leading or at least 2nd tier SNS in China, if all of them really embrace OpenSocial platform, it would be a great news for those widget developers.
Partly because of lack of hosting sites, the development of widgets in China is far behind the development in Silicon Valley, esp. when you consider how quick a copycats could emerge in China. Now, with the efforts of OpenSocial by Google, we can see the feasibility of building widgets and third-party apps. On the other hand, if the main stream SNS in China adopt OpenSocial platform, it will, at least to some extent, reduce the complexity of developing apps to be in compliance with different platforms.
Of course, there are still some big giants in China’s web who might not join this OpenSocial alliance, such as Tencent and Baidu. What they plan to do will affect the landscape of open platform in China. However, we don’t expect they will launch open platform in near future.