Google’s OpenSocial - is it really that open?
Okay - now I know that entire blogosphere has been talking about the Google’s OpenSocial but I still wont mind adding my two cents to this one.
First up, as I have said in previous posts - social networking does require a lot more to reach to its full potential. Though it is reaching new heights every day - there is no doubt that the extent to which SN can be useful is way more than where it stands today.
Google’s OpenSocial is very certainly a step forward. Like most times - Google have certainly got it right by not trying to create another SN but rather create an integrator - something thats very much required. Social networking has a peculiar usage pattern and an important factor that a user typically prefers to enroll into an SN where his or her buddies hang out. So - porting of users is not very simple - thus just another new SN would have hardly done this world any good. But, OpenSocial - as a common API across multiple existing SN’s is a charm for sure.
But wait - here’s an important factor to consider. Tim O’Reilly’s post (at http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/11/opensocial_social_mashups.html) very correctly talks about something of extreme importance. If the data between different SN providers wont be shareable, than all we have from OpenSocial is a comfort for developers to use same language and syntax for developing those SN applications. Though this is certainly an advantage, a bigger leap and a genuine step forward would be when these developers can build SN applications that aggregate data from multiple SNs or use capabilities of multiple SNs. I would say, as of now it is not very clear if OpenSocial supports this.
I also feel that it wont be supporting this for now since if this would have been the case, Google would have gone ga ga about this by now. Also, this capability involves user privacy issues and many other factors to consider. On the other side OpenSocial Developer’s Guide has an API called People Data API that would allow developer to extract user information - this API, though, is not yet released.
Well, I would say, lets keep our fingers crossed till the initial excitement settles down and it becomes clearer if we would see - cross SN applications coming our way - that, for me, would be the real meat!
Well, our thoughts are quite similar. Yours, mine, and Tim’s
Opensocial might be helpful for programmers but the real thing would be to see how advantageous it is to end users. If it is not, you would still need accounts on more than one SNs and that is what is incovenient to users. And as rightly pointed out by you, it might not be supporting this otherwise there would have been a lot of talk about it by google.
Comment by Nimitt — November 12, 2007 @ 5:32 am
Yes Nimit - I also checked out some examples Google folks have put on OpenSocial site to see what’s in store - doesnt look like data mashing across sites in on the plate.
However, this is still exciting for Orkut and other SNs that have joined the party considering that these SNs have all been very closed without new applications flexibility. So, all in all, they will reach the level of Facebook to the least - but yes, not beyond that I guess - from an end user perspective.
Comment by illusionsofreality — November 12, 2007 @ 10:31 am