What is OpenSocial?
TechCrunch revealed today that, instead of launching a new social networking platform, Google will launch OpenSocial, a set of three common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any hosts, social networks, that choose to participate. These APIs give developers access to the data needed to build social applications: access to a user’s profile, their friends, and the ability to let their friends know that activities have taken place. The initial lineup of hosts, or participating social networks, include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle (update: MySpace, Bebo and SixApart have also joined OpenSocial). The initial lineup of developers include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.
You can also see a press release on the subject posted on John Battelle’s Searchblog.
What is my overall impression of OpenSocial?
In my opinion, Google gets three on three for not calling it Maka-Maka, for not falling into the Orkut vs. Facebook trap –
While a lot of bloggers are looking at ‘Maka-Maka’ in a Orkut vs. Facebook context, I think Google will be short-selling itself if it looked at the opportunity in such a limited way.
– and for creating a path-breaking open-source platform that will genuinely benefit everyone in the web 2.0 value chain – social networks, application developers and end users – and allay fears about the web 2.0 boom being a mere bubble.
What does OpenSocial mean for each stakeholder in the web 2.0 value chain?
So, what does OpenSocial mean for each stakeholder – Facebook, other social networks, application developers, end users and Google itself?
What does OpenSocial mean for Facebook?
OpenSocial is bad for Facebook because –
- Facebook will lose its proprietary lock-in on application developers.
- Over time, Facebook may also lose its lock-in on end users.
- In future, Facebook may face competition from a social advertising application from Google embedded in OpenSocial.
OpenSocial is good for Facebook because –
- It will encourage more developers to start writing social networking applications.
- It will encourage more users to start using social networks.
What does OpenSocial mean for other social networks?
OpenSocial is especially good for new social networks because –
- It will enable social networks to offer the same user experience as Facebook via common applications.
- It will help social networks to scale up user registrations quickly by lowering the entry barrier for users via shared profile, friend and activity data.
- It will allow social networks to position themselves in increasingly focussed niches.
What does OpenSocial mean for application developers?
OpenSocial is brilliant news for application developers because –
- It is based on HTML and JavaScript, languages most application developers already know.
- It allows developers to “learn once, write anywhere”, or write front-ends for different social networks using the same API and the same back-end.
- It is both easy to implement for simple applications and easy to customize for complex applications.
- Application developers don’t have to choose between the Facebook platform and the OpenSocial platform.
What does OpenSocial mean for the end users?
Most importantly, OpenSocial will benefit end users because –
- It will allow end users to use the same applications across social networks.
- Over time, it will allow end users to share and synchronize profile, friend and activity data across social networks.
- Over time, by allowing more niche social networks to evolve, it will increase the social networking options available to end users.
What does OpenSocial mean for Google?
OpenSocial is a strategic breakthrough for Google because -
- It will help Google to break Facebook’s stronghold on social networking.
- It will allow Google to launch its own social advertising service to rival the one about to be launched by Facebook.
- It may allow Google to enter into the social search engine space on the lines of Facebook.
- It may also allow Google to develop a marketplace for bringing together application developers and social networks.
- It will allow Google to build public consensus on sharing of personal data before it builds interconnectedness between it’s own applications.
- It will help Google to increase its ad revenues because of overall increase in Internet usage.
What are other bloggers saying about OpenSocial?
While the whole blogosphere is buzzing with OpenSocial related posts (see Techmeme and Technorati), most of them are just focusing on the very superficial Facebook aspect. A small minority of bloggers, on the other hand, do seem to get the bigger story.
In an absolutely brilliant post, Marc Andreessen writes why OpenSocial is the next big leap forward for web 2.0 –
Open Social basically standardizes the concept of a plug-in API in such a way that neither host social networking environments nor external applications will ever have to invent another plug-in API, or have to choose between multiple competing proprietary plug-in APIs. Many standards die an early death because they are too complicated and hard to implement. Open Social is what you want in a standard — it’s expansive enough to do useful things, but limited enough to be very easy to implement.
The New York Times story on Open Social focuses on the Facebook aspect but also says that Google’s bigger game-plan might be to develop a model where it gives away free open-source software to developers, not only to improve Google’s own applications, but also to improve other applications, so that overall Internet usage increases and it could benefit indirectly by selling more advertising.
I bumped onto LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick’s manifesto called Thoughts on the Social Graph through Google Blogoscoped. Brad said in August that the goal of his project at Google (presumably OpenSocial) is to ultimately make the social graph a community asset, dependent on data from various social networks, but independent of any company or organization as “the” central graph owner –
(The goal is to) establish a non-profit and open source software (with copyrights held by the non-profit) which collects, merges, and redistributes the graphs from all other social network sites into one global aggregated graph. This is then made available to other sites (or users) via both public APIs (for small/casual users) and downloadable data dumps, with an update stream / APIs, to get iterative updates to the graph (for larger users). While the non-profit’s servers and databases will initially be centralized, (the goal is to) ensure that the design is such that others can run their own instances, sharing data with each other.
Do note that Brad doesn’t seem to be overly focused on undermining Facebook.
ClaimID creator Fred Stutzman says that Google is using OpenSocial to build public confidence before it breaks the walls between its own properties and interconnects our personal data residing across properties –
So what is Google really trying to do? By placing “opensocial” in the open, Google is demystifying how it will interconnect its properties. This is as important strategic move; Google contains so much personal information about all of us that openness will benefit the company when Google decides to interconnect.
ZDNet blogger Dan Farber thinks that Google will use OpenSource to enter the social advertising space –
OpenSocial is part of Google’s quest to increase usage of the Web. More applications can mean more searches and ad searches. You could also expect some new advertising services based on tapping into the OpenSocial APIs that work across all compliant social networks. In addition, Google will weave OpenSocial across its services beyond Orkut, such as iGoogle, and eventually embed the social graph in the Internet fabric for its users.
I totally love how Richard McManus describes OpenSocial as the ‘third place’ of social networks –
Simply put, Google has created a distributed social network framework that will end up competing with Facebook and MySpace. It is kind of a ‘third place’ of social networks – and it is a huge boost to the less populous or more specialized social networks.
Finally, according to ZDNet blogger Caroline McCarthy, in spite of all its brilliance, Google may run into various roadblocks with OpenSocial –
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… 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… Additionally, some of the OpenSocial participants have not abandoned their existing in-house platform strategies… 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.
