Anti Opensocial?

Written by Tangos on December 9, 2008
Tags:, ,

Today, some of my friends is twittering a new website called Anti-opensocial.com. The site said, “Not real open but just cheat, this is OpenSocial in China. We think Google could do better than just support fake Open Platform. Could OpenSocial do something really useful to help these surviving third party developers?!”.

Why they boycott Opensocial in China? That’s because 51.com just announced that in next 6 months, 51.com will develop several kinds of apps inhouse, all of them are very popular apps such as friends for sale, parking war, pet raising. This actually makes it impossible for third-party developers to develop and monetize similar apps on 51.com’s platform, which is unacceptable to app developers.

Since 51.com is a close partner of Google’s Opensocial in China, they ask developers to boycott the coming Opensocial Hackathon in Beijing and Shanghai(check out this event calendar), and want to appeal to Google not to be with evil partners.

Actually, 51.com’s announcement also tell the situation of open developer platform in China. Many China’s open platforms are not really open, they are not building an healthy eco-system. They not only want to be a platform to take advantage of third-party apps, they also intend to be app developers who own all the most popular apps, and take the biggest benefit from the apps. If there is no healthy ecosystem, what can you expect from an open platform?

One Response to “Anti Opensocial?”

  1. Michael Netzley, CommunicateAsia, corporate communication, Asia, Web 2.0 on December 10th, 2008 8:10 pm

    [...] Tangos discusses open social in China.  His observation about the ecosystem offers an interesting snapshot of at least one [...]

Post a comment