All out Assault on Facebook!

I love tag clouds, they give you an at-a-glance kind of overview of what’s hot on the Blogosphere at the moment. Two words that are out and out favourites activity wise over the past few days are ‘Open Social’ and ‘Facebook’.

Battle Front 1

It seems that the first real competition for Facebook is about to arrive in the form of Open Social, a conglomerate of social networking organisations including LinkedIn and most importantly Google as it is with Google that this gallery of goons becomes a super force strong enough to take on Facebook head on.

Who’s going to win this battle? Web guru, Vinny Lingham is confident that the super force of Open Social will kick Facebook into the outer galaxies of hyperspace, I’m not so confident however. Although the fundamental concept of open source is that it will be available across multiple platforms, which is how it should be, I am not sure how many people will be willing to leave the white picket fences of Facebook for any other platform. You see for me, the beauty of Facebook was that it brought people that avoided the Internet like a hook worm in their foot back online or online for the first time, kind of like what Harry Potter did for children’s books. 90% of my friends probably fall into this category and I predict they will stick with Facebook regardless of how good Open Social will be, kind of like how 90% of Americans have never left their own state cause they know it well and they are comfortable there. So if all my friends are on Facebook only, I won’t be moving either.

Want to know more about Open Social? Read this post by Marc Andreessen

Battle Front 2

All the hype around Facebook often detracts from the fact that the octogenarian of the social networking scene, Myspace, is still around and in fact still has a lot more members than Facebook so, in essence, more influence.

In this article, My Space is said to have raised it shaky hand from beneath the social networking pile and announced that a platform for the development of applications on MySpace is around the corner which according to Paul Gillin, New Media consultant, is a direct response to (I say attack on) Facebook. He continues: “MySpace is simply taking a good idea and adapting it... for them, it is a no brainer."

Who will win this one? My money is on Facebook. MySpace pages are ugly and cluttered enough already and now they want to add applications which as a general rule are ugly and cluttered.

Battle Front 3

In this article by Tom Hespos, Imedia Connection, questions whether Microsoft’s purchase of Facebook was for the right reasons (as a channel for its banner ads) and quite frankly, worth it.

There is a lot of general discussion from industry commentators, questioning how effective Facebook really is as a marketing tool and whether any major company has managed to prove that they increased bottom lines by advertising / activity on Facebook. I have however no doubt that if you are the right kind of fashionable / aspirational brand, that Facebook is a great place to grow your brand presence within niche markets. The Redbull Roshambull application comes to mind immediately.

All in all, I am still loyal to Facebook as I believe it does the basic things well. It is also the platform that woke me up to the potential of social networking. I think it has the potential to survive these attacks but it will all depend on how they respond and improve. They can start with RSS feeds on their group comments.