Taobao's Open Platform Is Unique, It Is For The Real Money

For how long, the Open Platform has being played around in China? Things were quite exciting especially when you read almost all the leading social networks agreed to support open standard such as OpenSocial. Almost two years passed since Sohu launched the first Open Platform, some people finally found it was not that interesting as they were expecting. 51 is now closing down its platform and only accept applications from trusted third parties, and RenRen requires its application development partners to sign an exclusive agreement which means the applications can not be deployed on other social open platform for a certain period.

Even though the hype of Open Platform for Chinese SNS seems gone, Taobao, as the e-commerce site with over 85% C2C market share in China, launched its own Taobao Open Platform (TOP) which allows third parties build the applications that can access the data from Taobao, such as the products details, the seller information etc.

1. Why OpenSocial idea is not working well?

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