CityIN, a new social network launched in last month that targeting the Hong Kong and China people is joining Google’s OpenSocial. As you know, OpenSocial is Google’s first plan to take on Facebook, with a goal to release application programming interfaces (API) that allowed developers to build variety of applications for a range of social networking sites. And the most notable high-profile partner was MySpace.

With the participation of CityIn in OpenSocial, it probably the first Chinese social network that opens its platform to the developers mainly China Web developers. Strengths of the participation in OpenSocial will help to increase the worldwide profile of CityIN, this can be viewed from all the reporting from the top blogs in the blogosphere. As a new startup, it’s probably the best way for them that draw attention to it. CityIn’s challenge will be to build a different social network as there are many among them in China, or throughout the world. As a new startup, that co-founded by young talents, it is currently undertaking the differentiation strategy and was nearly very brave to try out all the new things and developed a lot of new features on their site.

CityIN, co-founded by Simon Chan and Alex Tam, was first incorporated in Hong Kong, and later setup the main operation office in Guangzhou, China in 2007. Simon Chan, 26 and Alex Tam, 25, seemed to be the Internet enthusiasts. With their passion on the Web, and work experience (Simon Chan is a former E-Trade software engineer, reported by VentureBeat), they planned to make CityIN the best ever social network in China. The site is easy-to-navigate, vividly presented content such as latest users, latest events happening in Guangzhou, and a second-edition of recommendation engine, which they’ve planned to apply for the patent in the US, Japan, and Hong Kong in the later stage. Recommendation engine is broad in scope, but it is enough to build a strong bridge from its users of the site that belong to a same group of leisure interest to some friends reside in local areas they might interested to interact with. If they continually improve its recommendation approaches, it might make a lot of potential users to have that compel feeling to join.

Additional interesting feature found on CityIN is the automatic face detection for photo tagging. As one of the hyperlinks they’ve sent to me, as shown in the below picture, it showed how a hassle less feature for CityIN user to play around with. At present, CityIN wasn’t comprehensive yet, with the English proficiently level of its co-founders, it’s no surprise that they’ll launch a brand new English site to cater to the US, Europe, or some countries whereby Friendster is strong at, such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia.

Also, in pertaining to its participation on OpenSocial, CityIN still does not have the resources to build proprietary add-on yet. In other word, CityIN will going to be 100% OpenSocial at the beginning stage. However, they’ve received some favorably response from the industry players in casual game sector.

CityIN currently has 11 employees and they’ve been angel invested for a undisclosed sum by Dr. Samson Tam in early 2007. Dr. Tam, who invented the first electronic Dictionary Device (Chinese-English), is the chairman of a listed company in Hong Kong.

Well done, Simon.

Picture: Automatic face detection for photo tagging

Source: available at http://static.cityin.com/images/screenshots/facedetect/steps123.png, accessed at March 22, 2008.

If you want me to pick the hottest news in February other than the Yahoo! bid, I would agreed that it was MySpace Developer Platform and its social platform war. MySpace, as the top social networking site, has widely reported that lagged behind in building a truly social platform, whareas Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, Orkut, Friendster have all expanded to this social platform territories. It is common sense to assume that MySpace did not started its serious incursion into this territory because of the second-mover strategy. They have reported more than 200 million user accounts, without being the early leader in the social platform arena, they still owned the largest number of users throughout the world. However, the launched of a platform that enables a range of social software solutions will make their technology appreciably more easy.

On 5 February 2008, MySpace announced the MySpace Developer Platform and released application programming interface (API), it became a huge opportunity for Web 2.0 startups to build applications based on MySpace API and from there, directly engage with the MySpace’s 200 million users. Currently, MySpace Developer Platform is in sandbox phase, that mean documentation, capabilities, and end-user features are slowly adding to their developer site. Meanwhile, MySpace users would only allowed to access all the applications on MySpace Application Gallery in early next month. Given the brand name of MySpace, Slide, the world’s largest personal media company, has announced that it will launch several new applications, including Slide FunWall and Slide SuperPoke on MySpace.

via [CNET]

I found some short videos about some founders or key personnel of the Internet startups who were being interviewed on OpenSocial topic, you can watch the videos by clicking here: FotoFlexer, LinkedIn, Ning, Flixster, Plaxo, Shelfari, and Slide talks about OpenSocial. The interviews were prepared by GoogleDevelopers.

Meanwhile, I have embedded a video clip entitled, “iLike talks about OpenSocial” in the below. Enjoy!

In a press release of Google today, Google stated that MySpace has agreed to join force in launching OpenSocial. OpenSocial, much perceived as Google’s answer to the long-standing popular Facebook platform, is a set of APIs for building social applications on the Web. MySpace announced earlier that they will launch their own platform and it seems their project plan is still on and they’re not going to abandon it. But their forthcoming own platform might be entirely based on this OpenSocial, as MySpace was served as the founding member of this platform. Also, this press release also names Engage.com, Friendster, Hi5, Hyves, Imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, Orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING as the OpenSocial’s global partners.

OpenSocial is based on the idea of “social platform” and the trend of social platform has only recent emerged. Furthermore, it opens up the future territory of the direction for social platforms when users, partners or different social networks that demand for more social connections. Developers that developed widgets for social networking sites can now access the APIs and use the user profile, friends’ network, the social network data and metadata and many new functions. On the other hand, the space for OpenSocial to continue evolve is dynamic, especially when the audience size of this OpenSocial, i.e. the total number of users in the above mentioned social networks is expected over 250 million, albeit that the factor of overlapping is foreseen.

Apparently, OpenSocial is getting more buzz now. By contrast, OpenSocial was an unimpressive alternative to Facebook’s platform until MySpace confirmed its participation, said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes. “This is more likely to get developers’ attention,” Valdes said on Thursday. Meanwhile, The New York Times is reporting that Google’s OpenSocial is not a Facebook killer.