Breaking industry barriers - Google and OpenSocial

Something amazing is happening out there: A next wave of business disintermediation - breaking up the walled gardens of "customer aggregators" online. On one side you have the walled gardens. Facebook in online social networking, and even Yahoo. And on the other side, you have the aggressor, who almost always breaks down one or two barriers (walls) - in this case Google.

Facebook has a great thing going for them. As schoolkids grow up, they sort of jumped from one social network to the next - eventually settling down on the one where most of their core friends were. This tended to be Facebook for quite a few students. As Facebook increased the number of features and widgets on it, there was less temptation to go somewhere else online to hang out. Membership boomed. Facebook then opened itself to non-students, and membership grew even faster. There was just one problem - you needed to give up your existing profile on myspace or whatever and jump onto Facebook. This was the barrier.

It was also the barrier for a lot of other social networking sites. And then came Google's announcement. Some of the social networks have been brave enough to adopt opensocial which would let users of another social network access data of their customers and interact with them, and use common widgets. There's a strong strategic reason for to do so as it gets them access to new customers, and get more usage of their own proprietary widgets and services - especially those of Myspace which has adopted OpenSocial.

Will Facebook follow suit? Seth Godin feels that if one of the players breaks industry barriers, existing players in the industry will be hurt - except the one who actually broke the barrier.