Posts Tagged ‘opensocial’
OpenSocial and Baseball
In November 2007, David Mead wrote a post about OpenSocial, a tool from Google that creates a common API for social applications. OpenSocial is used by companies such as Ning to build applications that allow for ‘out of the box’ social networks.
Yes, you can build a social network. However, it might not look very pretty unless you understand how to web design and code CSS.
What does all of this have to do with baseball?
I was reading an article on BNET this morning about the Revenue Model for Baseball. Last year, Major League Baseball (MLB) took in $6.1 Billion. Considering the National Football League (NFL) took in $6.3 Billion, I would say they are getting something right.
MLB has figured out how to leverage the online world. Teams are building smaller parks, but selling rights to streaming video to compensate for the decreased ticket sales.
One of the biggest players in this model is Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM). Essentially, MLBAM controls MLB.com. It also means that major and minor league teams who subscribe to their service are beholden to the capabilities of MLBAM.
Where does that leave a team who wants to do more? The world of OpenSocial. This year, the Lake County Captains wanted to do more with their online program and BAM didn’t have the necessary tools. What did they do? They build a social network – one built on the OpenSocial platform – www.captainsbaseballfans.com.
The platform allowed the organization to quickly get separate fan-focused entity online that accomplished the goal of photo, video and community in one package. With a sport where the rooster changes are frequent, the social network was a way for fans to become involved with the game beyond the field. The website’s name leveraged their existing URL – www.captainsbaseball.com – to help with recognition and memory.
True, baseball is big business, but OpenSocial might just be the batter that can hit it out of the park.
August 22nd, 2008 by The Adcom Group Tags: Baseball, MLB, MLBAM, Ning, opensocial in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday Links – 2007-11-05
- Guy Fawkes and Bonfire Night
- Mixx – News, photo, and video sharing
- Enrich and extend your blog-post
- All about Google’s OpenSocial
- Mahalo has a daily show
- Generating Digg traffic
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November 5th, 2007 by The Adcom Group Tags: digg, guyfawkes, mahalo, mixx, opensocial, tesla roadster in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Is OpenSocial the beginning of a truly social internet?
So I read Om Malik’s post Tuesday about OpenSocial – Google’s platform for social networks. Exciting stuff!
Having the day off on Wednesday meant that I missed some shuffling on this story and then today, when details were scheduled to be released, even more players came to the fore when the press conference was moved up.
Google’s OpenSocial is a set of commons APIs for use with all social networks that participate. This is different from Facebook who developed their own markup language which does not play with others…at all.
Marc Andreessen has a good screencast showing OpenSocial working on his blog. His Ning network is one of those taking part.
TechCrunch has a piece with the update news release and the new players, including MySpace (abandoning their own markup languauge), LinkedIn and Salesforce.com so this is not just about seeing what your “friends” favorite movie is. This can, and will, impact businesses as well as their employees in and out of the workplace.
Now I haven’t seen any chatter about where Social Network Portability fits in, which is a shame, but with open and shared APIs that are based around normal HTML etc. it can’t be too far behind.
This is definitely something to keep an eye on over the coming months.
Technorati tags: opensocial, google, microformats, social+networks,api
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November 1st, 2007 by The Adcom Group Tags: "socialnetworks", api, google, microformats, opensocial in Uncategorized | No Comments »