OpenSocial enables
developers to learn a single set of API's and write applications that
work in multiple places, minimizing work and maximizing distribution.
It's about time someone cracked the social networking nut.
Google is expected to announce a social networking platform later
this week. Called OpenSocial, it will include tools to allow developers
to create applications that utilize personal and social data contained
in participating social networks. It is the first step toward putting
you back in control of your online relationships.
"Facebook and MySpace are trying to build a proprietary web
platform," says John McCrea, vice president of marketing at Plaxo, one
of Google's partners in deploying OpenSocial. "Those of us that believe in openness saw that as a threat to the open web."
As Wired News complained earlier this year, social networks like MySpace and Facebook profit by keeping data about you and your friends locked up. And while it's possible to replicate much of the functionality of Facebook
using open-source tools, the critical missing component is the "social
graph" -- the map of relationships between people that makes it
possible for you to see when your friends add applications, photos or
new connections to their profiles.
Google appears to be supplying that missing piece, with tools to
allow developers access to the social graph and other personal data on
participating networks.
While the announcement later this week will initially interest only
developers, it's the first step towards building interoperable networks
where users actually own their own data.
Slide CEO Max Levchin compares
the Google API to the first wave of video games: techy and not very
flashy, but a precursor of things to come.
"You look at something like Pong now and it compares poorly with
what we have today, but at the time it was like a nuclear bomb in the
gaming industry," Levchin says. "Right now you look at the applications
on Facebook and there just isn't that much that's really sophisticated.
There's years of development before we see something like Quake in
social networks, but that's where this is going."
As first reported on TechCrunch,
OpenSocial is a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that
will allow independent developers to build applications that run on any
participating network, using the data stored by that network.
OpenSocial is designed to enable developers to access three specific
pools of data: users' profile information, friends info (the social
graph), and activities.
A Google spokesperson confirmed that the new API will be supported
by a long list of second-tier players in the American social networking
space: Hi5, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Orkut, Ning and Friendster. In addition,
blogging platform vendor Six Apart confirmed to Wired News that it
would be supporting OpenSocial.
Enterprise software vendors Salesforce and Oracle round out the list
of potential platform supporters, while widget developers RockYou,
Slide, iLike and Flixster have signed on to supply applications based
on the platform.
The participating networks have far fewer users in the United States than their leading competitors. According to ComScore,
MySpace has 68 million monthly U.S. users, Facebook boasts 30 million
and the OpenSocial networks together have just 22 million monthly U.S.
users.
However, they are aiming at different markets. The participation of
LinkedIn, Salesforce and Oracle suggests that the fruits of OpenSocial
may include a crop of business-oriented social networking applications,
far different from the fun-and-games orientation of most Facebook and
MySpace apps.
"The killer app for OpenSocial will be somebody making a really good
spreadsheet component," says Anil Dash, chief evangelist for Six Apart.
"There's no way a company wants to host an application like that on
Facebook, especially in the world of [regulatory laws] HIPAA and
Sarbanes-Oxley. It would just be asinine."
LinkedIn senior director of products Adam Nash says his company's
users will probably see the impact of the new partnership with Google
sometime in early 2008, although it won't necessarily be about
connecting with other social networks, as some have suggested. "What
you'll see in the end is great third party developers making even more
business apps for us very soon," he said.
In fact, the company is going to demo one such app called the
Conference Calendar at a Google event this week. According to Nash, the
new app will automatically know what industry you work in (based on
your LinkedIn profile) and subsequently spit out a series of relevant
upcoming conferences based on this info.
Adam Gross, vice president of development and marketing at
Salesforce, also says he expects OpenSocial will do wonders for his
company's ability to provide its customers with even more useful data.
"This continues a trend of using consumer technologies to make
business technologies better," Gross says. "From my point of view,
OpenSocial is really about the widget economy we've seen in a short
amount of time build up around social networking," he added.
"OpenSocial is energizing that economy now as developers work can be
translated to different contexts and platforms."
In that sense, Google's open APIs will "pour even more fuel on a rapidly burning fire."
There are hurdles. One is building sufficient momentum when the two biggest social networking sites are not represented.
Another is complexity, says Socializr CEO and Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams. "Previous efforts like FOAF [friend of a friend] and OpenID were pretty complicated. For something to be useful from the user's perspective it has to be simple and easy," says Abrams.
Regardless, Google's move is a big bet on interoperability -- and
against the "winner take all" philosophy of social networking,
according to Six Apart's Dash.
"The market has already decided that there's going to be a long tail
of social networks, and that people are going to belong to more than
one. As soon as you belong to more than one, this kind of
interoperability is critical," Dash says. "Open standards win every
time."