Facebook just became more attractive for application marketing: Bebo joins platform (Open Social development going slow)

Bebo announced today that it will embrace the Facebook application platform for its own applications. Bebo had earlier announced to be part of the Open Social network initiated by Google, but now seems eager to offer developers the chance to build apps for Bebo as soon as possible. Bebo is no longer mentioned on the official Open Social site. We think that other social networks might follow soon, leaving Google out in the cold as the sole member of Team Open Social. Social networks can’t wait to have a universal platform for their applications, since they, too, realize that uniformity is key to keep their customers. They simply do not want to run the risk of losing members to rivals if members discover an application that they love on a competitor’s site. Applications are becoming very important in social networks’ battle for members.

The decision to give Open Social a low profile is definitely affected by the slow progress of the development of the platform, which aims to please all parties involved before it builds anything. Facebook has gambled and won, by just throwing their application platform out there, seeing if it was appreciated, and then deciding to let other parties in on it.

So where does that leave us, marketers? By now we should be considering advertising on applications / widgets/ gadgets. They are entertaining media by definition and can reach a high level of targeting. For marketers, a common platform is very useful for developing, implementing and tracking a campaign, so the network through which we can reach the most users would be the most useful. Open Social still has support from MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, and Friendster, but will have to come up with some concrete results soon; it looks like developers will have to wait at least until mid-January 2008 to work with Open Social. Seeing as we can already select applications to advertise on, on the Facebook-Bebo network, we would recommend talking with application developers for those sites.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 1:00 am and is filed under Social Marketing. 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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