Google released a set of standards called OpenSocial, which will allow developers to, instead of writing, say, a Facebook application which only works on Facebook, an application that will work on any social network that supports OpenSocial (which a lot of the other social networks other than Facebook/MySpace do).
It’s not the open social network.
It’s not going to unseat Facebook or MySpace. It’s (right now) just a way to court developers to write applications that will work on multiple social networks. If an OpenSocial app won’t work on the big guys, there is no incentive for them to write it for OpenSocial.
Even if they did, who cares? We still have yet to see any really groundbreaking, amazingly useful, social networking applications. (Fine, I did say I can think of some useful ones for LinkedIn… I hope this is not the LinkedIn platform mentioned a while back)
I’m skeptical as to how user data will transfer seamlessly between networks. I doubt it will. How can your list of friends (blah blah social graph) get transferred?
I think it’ll go the way of OpenID, which attempted to serve as a common login for any web application (IE, you wouldn’t have to create a new username and password for every single website you visit). It never gained traction, in part to it being pretty complicated for people to understand and developers to integrate, and it’s disappeared, for the most part.
In any case, it’ll be days before someone develops a Facebook application that serves as a harness between the Facebook API and the OpenSocial API. Will Facebook ignore it? Ban it? Buy it?
