Open Social

Google's "OpenSocial" developer site is live. Check out http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ to find out what the buzz is all about.

Also it's a lengthy video at 55mins but a great video to get a good grounding in what this means is here;

I've got to say I was very surprised with what i saw. Originally I thought Open Social was just a "me too" reaction to the popularity of Facebook.

What I've seen so far is that Open Social is instead an agreed upon set of API's that allow you to "transfer data" from multiple sites using a set of defined rules. For my non technical friends think along the terms of a group of companies agreeing to what HTML should look like.

So what this means is that as a developer I could write an application that shows my photos on the Google Orkut site but this would then be easily importable into MySpace.

What this means as a user is lets say I post a music widget to MySpace I can also let my friends add it to their Orkut page.

Developers should be able to build a widget that runs the same on all Open Social compliant sites.... :) - yeh maybe. this is supposedly the way it's meant to work, we'll see how it operates in real life.

I've said this in another post but I think it deserves commenting on again - I was very surprised to see Salesforce.com as a member of Open Social, I'm very excited about this and cant wait to see what this means in the long run.


Cheers,
Dean