I don't personally think they had the power to stop Google, and I don't think Google would have done it anyways. But if they did have a chance, I really think they should have tried in order to get bigger faster and keep their walled garden as long as they could.<p>That being said, I am happy that OpenSocial is not stopped, its definitely better for everyone.
Had they allowed Google to invest, Google would probably not have proceed to support OpenSocial so quickly. They would have protected their investment into FB. Don't be fooled by Google's PR.. they do play tough. If you want to see how Google operates similarly to how MS operates, go back and do some googling on how they threatened StumbleUpon guys. They basically told them that unless they allow them to buy them (instead of eBay), they will destroy them by adding StumbleUpon-like features to their toolbar.
facebook in last 3 years gone from a milion dollar valuation to 15 billion.<p>Google has its grudge against Facebook, microsoft has invested and created a high valuation and facebook potentially launching a ad service with better user preference knowledge than its old adsense platform<p>facebook is growing and has a mindshare of top 16-30 year olds, the youth whom every advertiser targets.<p>Facebook app development is not easy, no ajax, fancy UI for now, but as a innovator and a great developers dveloping facebook and facebook apps they can overcome those.<p>if google had to team with up everybody to compete against facebook and facebook application developers then facebook has been able to achieve what it intended to.<p>but over time expect opensocial to add other API besides current widgetting capabilities as they dont want to look like a cheap imitation.<p>also I suspect google would be writing some intermediate code for interfacing developer apps with other opensocial sites.<p>most of this communication would be via REST and JSON<p>for developers and development companies like ours we would put our bets on apps/sites which give us better revenues and development oppurtunities. we would continue with facebook apps and may port some to opensocial if demand exists<p>
Further, many Facebook applications are not able to take advantage form the Facebook platform now. The platform paid off well for the early adopters and also for the most popular apps, but the majority of applications on Facebook are not seeing much return from the site. Whereas, through OpenSocial they are now able to reach out to a much larger audience, that is also a lot more diversified with a lot more itnerests. <p>On top of all these it is a lot easier to develop for OpenSocial as it is for Facebook, since you can merely use HTML and Javascript to do so, instead of learning the FBML (facebook markup language). Although it should be noted that in order for a developer to do more customized stuff, they will need to work with the APIs of those sites that have one, this way they can take total advantage of the underlying websites.