Lee Hill's "Living LinkedIn"

Google Announces the OpenSocial API, Brady Forrest

Google has announced OpenSocial, a new open API for social networks. The new standard will allow developers to create Facebook-like apps on any social network site that implements it with the same calls.

The open API will have three parts

• People
• Storage
• Activity stream

All of these calls will have a GData counterpart and they will use HTML and Javascript only. Google is considering adding OAuth (Radar post) to the API.

On Thursday the following links should go live:

• http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial -- the documentation for OpenSocial
• http://sandbox.orkut.com - a sandbox for testing apps

Google's launch partners are hi5, iLike, Slide, LinkedIn, Plaxo,  Ning and SixApart (the largest). Check out  Techmeme, Techcrunch, and the New York Times for more coverage.

Google will be holding the first of their developer CampFires at the GooglePlex this Friday to explain OpenSocial. A CampFire is Google's new method of disseminating information to developers. These events will be invite-only and will include about thirty developers. Video of the event will be available in the days following.

Google's OpenSocial API will gain traction with a lot of social networks, but I doubt that we will see Facebook or MySpace supporting it. Both are large enough to require their own API. I'll be curious to see how each site extends the OpenSocial API and how that affects adoption and app creation.

OpenSocial opens new can of worms, By Caroline McCarthy

When Google announced that its new social-networking initiative would extend to any site that wanted to participate, the land grab for the social Web's attention just got a whole lot more intense.

In a move that was anticipated for weeks, Google has unveiled

a set of application program interfaces

(APIs) that allow third-party programmers to build widgets that take advantage of personal data and profile connections on a social-networking site. But instead of limiting the project to its own social-networking property, Orkut, Google has invited other sites along for the ride--including LinkedIn, Hi5, Plaxo, Ning, and Friendster.

The initiative, appropriately, is called "OpenSocial." It's a clear contrast to Facebook, the social-networking site that became the talk of the tech world when it announced the opening of its developer platform in May but has kept developer activity restricted to its own service (and has since

signed an exclusive ad deal with Microsoft in exchange for an equity investment

, likely snubbing Google in the process). When other social networks began to announce their own "platform strategies" this fall, concerns were raised that developers would have to create a completely new application for each site. That could prove inefficient and costly, especially for smaller developers working on a shoestring budget.

 

 

OpenSocial, should it prove successful, would change that entirely. "At its highest level, Google is a company that is dependent upon having a great Web platform," said Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management, in an interview with CNET News.com. "This announcement is about making the Web better."

Creators of third-party applications are understandably optimistic. "In a lot of ways this is the greatest thing that could've happened to us," said Ali Partovi, CEO of social music site iLike. "We've already been very successful with that strategy on Facebook, but then spreading to every other social network out there without an open standard would be much more expensive, harder to justify, and harder to prioritize."

Executives at the social networks participating in OpenSocial were equally enthused. "We're in a period of time when we're realizing that social Web stuff isn't just fun, it's really fundamental," said John McCrea, vice president of marketing at Plaxo. "What we're seeing in walled gardens like Facebook and MySpace is an attempt to create a Web operating system, so there's been all this talk over the past six months about platforms...By supporting these OpenSocial APIs, we can carve out real estate that can be populated with any sorts (of applications)."

Notably absent from OpenSocial is MySpace, which has announced early-stage plans for a developer platform strategy and already has its advertisements served by Google. "We would love MySpace to be a part of it," Google's Kraus said, but declined to say why the News Corp.-owned social-networking site--or Facebook, for that matter--is not part of the deal.

MySpace representatives declined to comment.

Multiple sources who spoke to CNET News.com both on and off the record hinted that we will, indeed, only see the tip of the OpenSocial iceberg when it's formally unveiled on Thursday night. The RSS technology behind Google Reader, for example, was rumored to be the engine behind a super-powered "social news feed" akin to Facebook's. But that's potentially on the way. "Orkut is the first customer of OpenSocial on the Google side," Kraus explained. "We think there are opportunities to make Gmail and iGoogle more social as well," he said, but declined to elaborate.

Even before OpenSocial launches, there's already plenty of speculation as to how else the program could expand from its initial incarnation. "Their missing element is social search," pointed out Gartner analyst Ray Valdes. "That's not part of the APIs right now and Google doesn't really have a social search engine in the same way that Facebook has."

Or Google could leverage its new partnerships with information-rich social media sites to boost its AdSense advertising program, especially considering that Facebook is

planning to move into the sector

. "All that information that they're getting from those social networks, they could use that for an upgraded model of AdSense," suggested AllFacebook blogger Nick O'Neill.

But as the OpenSocial overseer, working through partnerships rather than its usual strategy of acquisitions, Google might not have quite as much power as it's used to. "Partnerships can certainly be very efficient," said RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady, who specializes in open-source technology. "They can also be very challenging. You're trying to get a bunch of different firms with competing interests to try to go along. Coalitions of this sort can be problematic over time."

It could also mean some rather un-Googly red tape. The individual social-networking sites are responsible for getting their own arms of the project up and running, and exactly when that will happen is by no means clear. Friendster users, for example, won't see any OpenSocial widgets until at least the beginning of December, and LinkedIn representatives told CNET News.com that while developer activity will begin soon, the full presence of the new platform won't be felt until early 2008.

 

Additionally, some of the OpenSocial participants have not abandoned their existing in-house platform strategies. "We have our own developer program," Friendster Vice President of Marketing David Jones said. "(Developers) will be able to use either Friendster's platform or OpenSocial...We already have hundreds signed up for the Friendster developer program." Jones added that Friendster's own platform will launch on November 30, before its OpenSocial integration does.

Then there's the Curse of the Zombie (or Vampire, or Pirate). By opting into OpenSocial, a social-networking site may find itself at odds with users who find embeddable applications to be distracting at best and spam-worthy at worst. This is especially pertinent to sites like Plaxo and LinkedIn, which promote themselves as productivity tools rather than ways to "

poke

" your friends. "In some ways, any of these different attempts to mash up between a property and things created by a vibrant developer community does open Pandora's box," said Plaxo's McCrea. "I think certainly, the results to date for Facebook are mixed because of some of those overly viral applications."

Adam Nash, LinkedIn's senior director of product, emphasized that Google is allowing participating social networks to decide just how open they want their OpenSocial platforms to be. "(OpenSocial) doesn't change the fact that we truly have no interest in zombie biting and food fights on LinkedIn," he emphasized. "In order to be in the LinkedIn directory, we will have some set of standards."

"I can't say that there will be no risks here," McCrea said. "I think we're in an early phase of the social Web, and it's an experimental phase, so I think we'll be learning as we go."

CNET News.com's Elinor Mills contributed to this story.

Google Cracks Open The World Of Social Networks, By Scott Gilbertson

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/10/google-cracks-o.html

Google is making waves in the social networking pond this morning with an as-yet-unofficial announcement about a new site-independent API, OpenSocial, that aims to make it easier to connect your profile and friends across social networks.

OpenSocial is a set of APIs that will allow independent developers to build applications that run on any participating network, using the data stored by that network. Partners in OpenSocial fall into two distinct groups: the social networks and the developers building outside apps.

Techcrunch, which posted the first details of the announcement, claims that OpenSocial’s hosts, or the participating social networks, include Google’s Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle (for those wondering what Oracle is doing on that list, the company recently unveiled Oracle Events, which is a social network of sorts).

Developers include some names you might recognize from Facebook’s platform, including Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide, all of which have successful Facebook apps.

OpenSocial consists of three APIs which are designed to allow developers access to common functions and data in social networks:

• Profile Information (your personal data)
• Friends Information (relationships within the host network)
• Activities (Events, postings, news feeds etc)

OpenSocial will use various existing programming languages to facilitate access to the APIs — there’s no need to learn yet another language like Facebook Markup, etc. Developers will thus be able to build once and deploy on any participating host network.

A few pressing matters haven’t been outlined so far in the unofficial news of OpenSocial, namely how privacy is handled and can anyone build an app. Judging by how the rest of the API seems to be designed privacy and access control will likely be in the hands of the host network. As for who can create apps, that seems to still be up in the air. Given the success of APIs like those at Flickr or Google Maps, it seems likely that the OpenSocial APIs will be available to anyone who wants to use them.[Update: I spoke with John McCrea, VP of Marketing at Plaxo, and he reports that, yes, anyone can build an app]

Many pundits have been saying that OpenSocial means trouble for the Facebook Platform and the coming-soon MySpace Platform, but that’s not necessarily true. There’s nothing to stop Facebook from adopting OpenSocial and leveraging its tools.

We think it’s far more likely we’ll see pigs sprout wings, but it could happen. Rather than a competitor to Facebook, Google’s OpenSocial simply reveals the limitations and lock-in of Facebook for what they are — an attempt to corral and control your data and limit outside developers.

Although it isn’t live yet, the new OpenSocial API information will reportedly live here and is expected to be online sometime later this week.

Google Aims to Break Open the Closed World of Social Networking, By Dylan Tweney

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."