By Chen Jing

The Q+3.0 version, which is about to be released, is dubbed the "next-generation QQ" by Tencent's co-CTO Xiong Minghua. From a purely IM tool to an open platform, the change of the QQ client exemplifies the deepening "openness" of the internet in the past year. "The internet has ceased to be a gateway, and has become a platform. In the future, Tencent intends to become an internet utility company that provides fundamental services", said Xiong Minghua. As more internet companies, such as 360, Baidu, Tencent, Taobao, and Sina, are making efforts to develop open platforms, internet service providers are trying to merge themselves into basic application level.

Portal websites' operating open platforms mean that they are transforming from being "stores" to being "supermarkets". Portal websites are becoming "supermarkets" that provide services to different developers. When the sizes of the supermarkets are big enough, they would be able to meet all aspects of demands of internet users, and thus increase the stickiness of the portals. Meanwhile, by dividing profits with developers, everyone is a winner.     

Providing platforms for medium- to small-sized developers

"Most open platforms are large enterprises' open interfaces to small enterprises", said Wang Xiaochuan, CEO of Sogou, pointing out another level of meaning of the existence of open platforms: providing more profit opportunities for medium- to small-sized internet developers. Like Apple's App Store and the Android Market, open platforms enable medium and small-sized developers to take advantages of web portals and gain large volume of traffic, and make use of basic resources, such as payment and relation networks, that are provided by the open platforms. 

Meanwhile, the top priority of an open platform is to attract as many outstanding developers as possible. In order to support medium and small-sized developers, Tencent increase developers' share of profit in the platform: for a developer whose monthly revenue is below RMB 100,000 Yuan, Tencent will not take a cut from the revenue; for a developer whose monthly revenue is between RMB 100,000 Yuan and RMB 1 million Yuan, Tencent takes 30 percent and the developer the rest 70 percent; for a monthly revenue of between RMB 1 and 10 million Yuan, Tencent and the developer would each take 50 percent.

In the view of Dong Xu, analyst of Analysys International, operators of open platforms should make distinction between their dual identities, being a referee and a player in the same time, in dealing with their relationship with developers, providing third-party developers and individual users with stable technical support and a safe internet environment, as well as all kinds of supports, including intellectual property rights protection.

Openness brings new value

Openness has brought significant benefits. In the past year, internet users have discovered that they can use a single account to log into renren.com directly from Baidu's homepage, and that they can also log into etao.com, a shopping search engine, with their Taobao or Alipay accounts and make purchase according to the search result directly from more than 100 independent B2C sites. The convenience of an inter-usable account brings values to websites. Alimama.com, which is owned by Etao.com, suggests that the company earned a commission of more than RMB 1.5 billion in 2011.  

Openness promotes marketing innovations of web portals. "Under the trend of marketing fragmentation of the internet, the marketing strength of multi-aspect internet companies is enormous", said Yang Weiqing, CEO of iResearch. In the view of Wang Xin, co-president and CMO of Sohu, users are accustomed to using multiple platforms; as marketing is developing in the direction of multi-platform integration, more and more advertisement clients are requiring comprehensive marketing solutions that incorporate multiple fields of the internet, including portal, video, search, forum, and Weibo. In this regard, Sohu provides the brand-new "Sohu + internet marketing acceleration tools", which includes 5 marketing acceleration tools such as influence acceleration, video acceleration, and relations acceleration, helping companies to capture target consumer groups in real time.