Google - The Social Butterfly

A long, long time ago — last Monday, that is — Facebook seemed a much larger land mass than it ever actually was. That was when it was celebrating its ability to command a generous $15 billion valuation while pocketing a $240 million investment from Microsoft.

At that point, Facebook and other social networking sites appeared to be the only companies in a position to instill fear in Google. Google has a social networking site of its own, Orkut, named after Orkut Buyukkokten, a Google engineer.

Measured in worldwide page views, it is in sixth place, with about 25 million unique visitors in September, according to comScore.

The decision by MySpace, with more than 100 million unique visitors in September, to join OpenSocial gives Google an impressive assembly of partners.

The group includes Bebo, the No. 1 networking site in Britain, as well as SixApart, Hi5, Friendster, LinkedIn and Ning — and Orkut, of course.

> Why Google Turned Into a Social Butterfly

MySpace Smacks Facebook

The surprise addition of the largest social- networking site, MySpace, to Google's OpenSocial consortium forms a big-threat to Facebook.

The idea of OpenSocial is to give developers one set of standards, known as APIs, or application program interfaces. Facebook still has the lead on buzz and the huge growth in applications, which fuel a lot of community interaction.