Google vs Facebook by Claudia Sonea

There are the names of two giants muscling one to the other. Google Inc announced on Tuesday that is setting up a distribution network for social networking applications. However, the new social networking platform won't be on the market until later this week. The main goal is to build a one-stop shop for software developers who create tools for sharing music, pictures, video and other personal interests on social networking sites. These tools are called widgets and are pretty famous since Facebook opened in May its Web site to accommodate outside developers who thanks to the 8000 widgets hosted has a worldwide audience of 50 million and a market value of $15 billion. Microsoft Corp. paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake of Facebook's Palo Alto-based company, trumping Google whose social network called OpenSocial expects to attract as many Facebook users as possible. The advantage Google has is that it hosts a lot of Web sites and the software developers will only have to code their applications once, while they will handle the rest. LinkedIn, hi5.com, Friendster and Ning, business software specialists Salesforce.com Inc. and Oracle Corp are some of the early participants. Also, three of Facebook's most popular Widget suppliers â€" Slide, RockYou and iLike will be on the list of developers feeding applications to Google. It is not a surprise, these developers offered widgets to hi5 too. Joe Kraus, a Google product manager stated on Tuesday that Google will certainly benefit from this. There is always the possibility of introducing ads. Google tries to get in the competition for a social network, after the existent Orkut seems to be appealing only to South Americans. Meantime, Facebook wants a piece of the advertising stake that Google holds. Therefore there is scheduled a meeting for its own advertising network on November 6. The rivalry between two giants is getting hotter and hotter, still until now Google leads by recently hiring away some of Facebook top engineers.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071031/ap_on_hi_te/google_social_networking;_ylt=ApPLijys_WKnWsuKYP3nJP.s0NUE

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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