Six months ago, OpenSocial was nothing but a list of promised partnerships. But the social network application platform backed by Google has made a lot of progress since then as those partners started to go live with their OpenSocial Apps. First there was MySpace and Orkut, then Hi5, and most recently Friendster. All told, if you add up the various social networks that are now live with OpenSocial, it reaches a total of 350 million users. And it will soon reach 500 million, as four more social networks and services prepare to launch by the end of of September (see chart above).
Google’s Joe Kraus gave me an update today on OpenSocial’s progress. He wouldn’t say which partners would launch next, but by the size of that pink bar in the graph above, one of them is relatively large—about the same size as Orkut. (My guess is that it will be either Bebo or Six Apart). He also mentioned some partners, such as imeem, launched without ever contacting Google (thanks to Apache Shindig) and that at this point only 10 percent of the engineers hashing out the OpenSocial specifications are from Google.
So how many OpenSocial apps are actually being used? There are about 4,500 different apps so far, which have been installed more than 150 million times. I couldn’t get daily active user numbers across all OpenSocial partners, but for Hi5 about 50 percent of members use an OpenSocial app at least once a day. There are 1,800 OpenSocial apps on hi5 alone, which have been installed 66 million times, so that may be representative of OpenSocial usage in general.
In contrast, Facebook, which is open-sourcing its own platform for developers, has nearly 37,000 apps, which have been installed 715 million times. RockYou’s apps alone have been installed 124 million times on Facebook.
Despite the strides it’s made in such a short time, OpenSocial still has alot of catching up to do.