Don’t discount Mozilla Firefox as a platform
This article reminded me that the Facebook vs. MySpace vs. Google platform wars may be a little premature. The biggest platform, outside the OS, is the browser. Everyone uses it, and through the browser, everyone accesses all other sites. Your browser stores your account information, commonly submitted form fields like email address, street address, credit card numbers. There are already a multitude of extensions.
This article reminds me that Google is working on a Google-branded Firefox browser. My guess is that this ties right in with Google’s claim to release a platform that is more open than Facebook’s. What if they centered it around the browser?
Here’s how this would work. Google knows my social network from Gmail, GTalk, and Orkut (if I use Orkut). Google knows all of my login credentials for all sites on the internet because every time I log into a new site, Google asks me if I’d like to save that information with them so that I don’t have to be bothered with logging in to Amazon, Netflix, eBay, etc. Google has access to my areas of expertise by applying semantic analysis (like what Twine does) to my emails (Gmail), documents/spreadsheets/presentations (Google office suite), and local files (Google Desktop). Google knows my financial portfolio (Google Finance). Google knows what areas I’m interested in (Google Reader, iGoogle, and my browsing history).
Mozilla could do this too - Combining Thunderbird (email) and Sunbird (Calendar) with Firefox would get you a social network, areas of interest, and login credentials. Various extensions have been created for RSS aggregation, messaging, bookmarking, etc. I think it would be a hell of a bold bet, but an interesting one.
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SocialStartups.com » Google’s Response to Facebook: “Maka-Maka” said,
October 29, 2007 @ 8:10 pm
[...] I was just writing up something like this yesterday. I said: Here’s how this would work. Google knows my social network from Gmail, GTalk, and Orkut. [...]