Plaxo's traffic leapt from 200,000 around the OpenSocial launch date to more than one million on November 14th - a staggering figure. It looks like Google may be onto a winner.
Plaxo Pulse, the photo and news sharing application of Plaxo, went live with OpenSocial on the first of November and it seems that their enthusiasm to embrace Google's new technology is paying off. John McCrea, VP of Plaxo marketing, said on the Palxo blog that, since announcing their role in Google's OpenSocial initiative:
"We have experienced a surge so strong that we had to expedite a hardware order, and shift focus temporarily from new features to scalability."
He acknowledges that the truly Open Social Web Plaxo he would like to see will require a lot of hard work - but appears quietly confident that the initiative will result in a secure web-wide platform from OpenSocial.
With forerunning social networking sites such as Engage.com, Bebo, Friendster and MySpace also implementing OpenSocial, and the ultimate goal being for any social website to be able to use OpenSocial's API and host third party social applications, it's clear that Google is aiming high. The search engine says that OpenSocial is the way to a happier Open Social Web, where developers cut costs by being able to write and maintain applications that work on multiple sites.
However some voices of dissent can be heard in the online jungle. An article in the The New York Times alleged that OpenSocial is a strategy designed with the one-upmanship of Facebook in mind.
It's true that the announcement of OpenSocial came just a week after Microsoft successfully won an advertising bid with Facebook, but whether Google have a vendetta against any particular social networking site is something we can only speculate on. What is undeniable is that a success story for OpenSocial may result in an unprecedented position of control for the internet giants - right at the centre of social networking.
OpenSocial certainly has the potential to explode the social networking domain and increase traffic for sites such as Plaxo Pulse. And, with Google pushing competition as well as cooperation, surely the average user can only benefit from the fierce battle for their attention - that is, if they don't become lost in a blizzard of applications every time they sign into a social networking site.
