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Written on 4th December 2008
1 COMMENT 
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Want to add social features to your site letting users share information and interact with friends while visiting some of their favorite websites?
Google Friend Connect lets you do that now. This service was in a limited beta since May but now it’s open to all webmasters (open beta). Friend Connect uses open standards like OAuth and OpenID to accomplish this task. The websites which uses Friend Connect can also run OpenSocial applications created by OpenSocial developer community.
It lets websites access username and password of the users along with friends list, feed massages, profile info, reviews and other info.
Google Friend Connect competes with Facebook Connect and Myspace Data Availability in taking control over you online identity. Which one will you choose for your website? (Update: Facebook Connect just announced the general availability too! See a presentation here.)
The learn more about Google Friend Connect watch their presentation video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N94s7ix0JPo
Written on 27th May 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Netlog, Europe’s social network darling, will announce at Google I/O tomorrow that OpenSocial support is on its way. Technical director Folke Lemaitre just said this at Kings of Code, a web developer conference in Amsterdam.
Although the official announcement will be made at Google’s largest developer gathering in San Francisco tomorrow, coders can already play with the new application possibility on this page. The public launch will be in June. When Lemaitre asked the Kings of Code crowd who already has developed an OpenSocial app, only one hand was raised. As you can imagine, he stressed that “everybody should now develop lots of OpenSocial applications”.
Netlog is still going strong. Although they had a small dip a few weeks ago, the number of members is growing rapidly. “The dip was caused by a failure in our private messaging application. It’s interesting to see what the influence of one single tool is”, Lemaitre told the audience. Other numbers are impressive as well, Netlog now has 35 million unique members and four billion page views per month. Moreover, the Belgium-based social network supports 19 languages and has more coming up. Oh and by the way, they sponsor our blog too. And that’s just one of their many smart strategic moves.
Written on 6th April 2008
1 COMMENT
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Since MySpace recently launched its MySpace Developer Platform (MDP), I was looking for some statistics on the virality of MySpace apps.
According to Fred Wilson, Zynga, which has launched a couple of Apps on MDP, has done some interesting research and found the following:
1) Myspace apps are not taking off in the same speed that Facebook apps did (see below). This is probably because MySpace is currently not promoting these apps nor linking to them in any way. There is no newsfeed to promote the apps and apps are only visible on profiles. You cannot invite friends to an app and apps cannot message users in any way. For now, apps are being installed only by those users who are aware that there is such a thing as apps.myspace.com. As Wilson writes, this may be a deliberate move on MySpace’s behalf: “This may well be an attempt by MySpace to avoid the “app spam” that became a problem with the Facebook platform and has been largely eliminated with the new rules that Facebook has implemented.”
2) There are major differences between the top twenty apps on MySpace as opposed to the top twenty on Facebook (see below). It is not yet clear why these differences exist, however, I believe that it’s just too early to tell which apps will be most popular on Facebook as all this is still in development plus many of the apps on Facebook are not yet available on MySpace.
I also understand from a friend who’s working on a MySpace app that even though apps created for MySpace should supposedly work on all other OpenSocial networks, several changes are still required in order to upload the app on each of the platforms.
In spite of all this, I still believe that developing a MySpace app now has enormous potential and at some point soon, the virality of these apps will take off in full speed. I do think that players who get in on the action early will enjoy dominant positions later on. In addition, in order to stay competitive, MySpace has allowed platform developers to run ads and keep 100% of the revenue.
Written on 4th December 2007
10 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Since Plaxo launched its Plaxo Pulse service it has seen another surge in its growth. The last time Plaxo published its numbers was in 2006 when it reported 15 million active users after it doubled its userbase within 6 months. Since then it has launched its popular Pulse service and the first live OpenSocial implementation.
“Dutch pageviews jumped from 2% to 6% of total”
Last week John McCrea (vice president of marketing for Plaxo) contacted me with an interesting tidbit of information regarding the growth of Plaxo Pulse. It seems that in terms of adding new Pulse users the Netherlands has the highest growth rate of all countries. Dutch Pulse pageviews jumped from 2% of total to 6% of total in one week. As you can see in the graph here, it is highly likely that Dutch users will overtake the UK to become the second-largest userbase outside the US.
Netherlands is light green; UK is dark yellow
There seems to be no special event that led to this sudden growth except the OpenSocial announcement by Google. However, the Netherlands is a very active social networking country with its largest social network (Hyves) adding its 5th million member somewhere this week.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
