Google released a couple days ago, along with an impressive set of initial partners, a set of APIs for building social web applications which they have decided to call OpenSocial. That name, OpenSocial, sounds intriging, doesn’t it? It’s a little off putting because what this new platform provides is not a means to open up our social graphs or help openly integrate the multitude of social networking websites out there. What it does is provide an standardized way for people write what are basically widgets, similar to what the Facebook application platform provides, and to easily embed those widgets in any number of social applications with little to no customization on a per-site basis.
It’s just a widget platform
OpenSocial is a very one-way system. It helps widget developers build applications off of each individual network’s data, but not to share the data between networks.
Because of the lack of generalized openness of the platform, the usefulness that these open applications provide is extremely limited and so what comes out of this is a way to embed random widgets. The widgets are non-specialized (at least by initial design) to the social networking websites they are used on and so what people build will be random in nature and will likely provide very little usefulness other than to amuse the users.
It’s too bad that this move wasn’t to open up the social graphs and help integrate the disjointed networks in all of these websites. That’s okay, though. This is still a great effort and a move in the right direction. As Tantek wrote, this is just one component of social network portability and does help social application developers a great deal.
The market is stronger now
As Fred Stutzman pointed out, having these widgets everywhere helps struggling/competing networks stay even with their competition. Now that everyone can provide a way to get these open widgets on their social applications they can say “Hey! Don’t leave! We have those too!”. While this seems helpless and slightly laughable it strengthens the competetive landscape.
As I listed in my recap of the Lessig lecture yesterday, the best way to keep a healthy corporate ecosystem is to encourage competition. The more competition is out there, the more trust will instill in the users of these applications. It will be easier for people to embrace competing networks without feeling like they all need to use “the one with the applications”. The hierarchy of social networking applications will likely flatten because of this. As Seth Godin pointed out, the choice now between social networks is, soon to be, hundreds of open sites (OpenSocial implementers) or one closed one (Facebook).
It seems like such a call for help
While more people having these applications helps the landscape, the inclusion of these widgets seem so forced. It’s sad to see promising services like Plaxo seemingly randomly embrace this without any reason other than that they can. When everyone has these applications they don’t add anything new or unique to any one network.
Time will tell which applications get listed on which networks and whether different implementations of the OpenSocial API will encourage different types of applications to be used. I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out.