By Saul Hansell
For the last year, Sergey Brin has been campaigning at Google with the slogan “features not products” in an attempt to reduce the sprawl of the company’s eccentric creativity. This campaign may have gone too far, at least when it comes to Google’s new OpenSocial initiative. Google’s new programming interface that allows social networks to communicate with applications is a nifty add-on feature, but it’s not a product. And thus it doesn’t compete with Facebook, despite the dozens of blog posts that say it does. I can’t believe OpenSocial, in itself, can revive Google’s Orkut social network, which is moribund most everywhere except Brazil. That said, if there are developers who write applications in Portuguese, Orkut could become even more popular and more widely used in Brazil than it already is. Think about Facebook. If you like Facebook, it’s still because of its core features — the way it lets you communicate and keep tabs on your friends. If you like any of the new applications, it is because on the margin they let you do what you already like doing a bit better. You can throw a sheep at someone instead of poking them...
For the last year, Sergey Brin has been campaigning at Google with the slogan “features not products” in an attempt to reduce the sprawl of the company’s eccentric creativity. This campaign may have gone too far, at least when it comes to Google’s new OpenSocial initiative. Google’s new programming interface that allows social networks to communicate with applications is a nifty add-on feature, but it’s not a product. And thus it doesn’t compete with Facebook, despite the dozens of blog posts that say it does. I can’t believe OpenSocial, in itself, can revive Google’s Orkut social network, which is moribund most everywhere except Brazil. That said, if there are developers who write applications in Portuguese, Orkut could become even more popular and more widely used in Brazil than it already is. Think about Facebook. If you like Facebook, it’s still because of its core features — the way it lets you communicate and keep tabs on your friends. If you like any of the new applications, it is because on the margin they let you do what you already like doing a bit better. You can throw a sheep at someone instead of poking them...