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The Challenges of Cross-Platform Development

Posted by Nick O'Neill on February 6th, 2008 11:00 AM

MySpace announced that their platform is now open for developers last night and by the end of the month, Google will be launching the Orkut platform. Suddenly within a couple months the social platform landscape has transformed from a single platform environment to multiple platforms all with different standards. You could have seen this coming long ago and that’s exactly the reason that Google announced OpenSocial in the first place.

OpenSocial Has No Standard Implementation
MySpace is the first major implementation of OpenSocial and it has only been a few days since it launched. Much of the conversation in the blogosphere so far has been focused on the benefits of the MySpace platform. One conversation in the OpenSocial group on Google Groups is fairly critical of the new MySpace platform:

This is setting a very dangerous precedent for the future of OpenSocial and Google needs to step in right now and force MySpace to comply with the spec. As it stands now, MySpace is the least common denominator among the OpenSocial implementations. This means that in order to write cross-platform apps, developers have to limit themselves to only using features that MySpace chooses to support. If you let every site pick and choose their own pieces of OpenSocial, you will soon end up with a pretty small common denominator.

Apparently OpenSocial is now a victim of the same problem they were trying to resolve. In theory it would be great if developers could build one application and it would immediately work across all platforms. This is the same problem that companies like Clearspring solved for the widget industry. Unfortunately OpenSocial needs to be adapted for each website that it interacts with. For those looking to learn OpenSocial as a development platform, MySpace is a great start but don’t expect it to be easy to simply port your application into Orkut and other social networks.

Applications Easily Get Lost in the Noise
Have you taken a look at the Facebook application directory recently? There are approximately 15,400 applications and there are over one hundred being added daily. By the end of the year there will be over 30,000 applications and it is going to be practically impossible to find anything that is useful. The application directory reminds me of Yahoo when it was a directory for the web instead of a search engine. Finally search came along and solved most of our problems.

Soon enough the platforms are going to need to come up with more effective search algorithms for their application directories. Also, as users began receiving a mass influx of application requests, they rapidly became less effective and now they practically have no effect at all. On the social web whether it is within social platforms or whether it is social media, things spread via word of mouth. That will continue to be the most effective form of marketing which also means that it will become increasingly challenging for applications to stand out from the rest.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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