I came across a few posts recently which claim that OpenSocial is not going to help Google much since it’s just a platform and it won’t help them increase the Orkut popularity. I don’t disagree with this argument, but what they go on to conclude is that OpenSocial is no big deal and probably is not going to make any difference for Google since this does not translate to increase in Orkut’s popularily. Now this conclusion is something which is not correct in my opinion - here’s why.

I think people who make this kind of argument are missing the bigger picture of Google’s strategy. Increasing the popularity of Orkut is a very small part of their strategy - definitely far from being the main factor why Google wants OpenSocial to succeed. In fact based on what we have come across recently, it seems they are content with Orkut being social networking site mainly for users in Brazil and India, and in parallel they are trying to make iGoogle and Gmail more social instead of hoping north American users to join Orkut.

It seems some of the bloggers are unable to see far enough into Google’s strategy with OpenSocial. Google understands that social networking and social applications are going to be one of the biggest and most happening areas on web in years to come, so instead of just being one of the players in this area (that is, by promoting Orkut), they are trying to widen their net and trying to bring common standards to applications that will be deployed on all such social networking sites, with Orkut being just one such sites.

Google’s business model still revolves (and will keep doing so) around online advertisements and they very much realize that social networking sites offer great opportunity to make the ads more targeted given the amount of information they have about the users. Google can of course monetize this opportunity by serving targeted ads on Orkut and letting application developers combine Adsense with their applications running on Orkut. But instead of limiting themselves to benefit from just one site, they want to create a platform that’s supported by most social networking sites! Apart from creating a platform that lets application developers write cross-site applications, OpenSocial also makes the user data available in a uniform way across all such sites thereby enabling products like Adsense to show highly targeted ads on all such sites that support OpenSocial! That’s exactly what Google is expecting OpenSocial to achieve for them.

To summarize, Google is not promoting OpenSocial just to make Orkut bigger than Facebook - instead there are two main objectives to this. First, this gives them a PR advantage as it portrays Google as proponent of Open platforms. But secondly and more importantly, they are doing this to leverage Social networking sites as a platform for serving targeted ads and further consolidate their leadership in the area of online advertising.

Your thoughts/opinions?