My take on Google’s Opensocial

[FilibertoSelvas]

OK; the last few days have been exciting and intense in my personal life, and because of that I may be the last person in the world to comment on Google’s OpenSocial announcements… which is lovely because I can now read through and distill many others J

So here notes from my reading:

·Seems Google really nailed down the APIs (in terms of ‘ease of use’), judging from what Slide said in this interview for ZDnet “Between the Lines”. Extremely important because this is one space where gaining critical mass soon will determine long term winners. A quote from Brian Kellner (NewsGator) in that Blog Post: “It’s pretty hard to do Facebook development, and it’s intertwined with their platfrom…” “Google’s OpenSocial is more flexible and lighter weight, with HTML and Javascript in the container..”

·I have heard some people questioning why is this different than what Facebook initially did? I think this GigaOM post summarizes it:

o“OpenSocial attacks Facebook where it is the weakest (and the strongest): its quintessential closed nature.”

·I love some of the reader’s comments in this techcrunch blog post (comments # 16 and #53):

o“Greg: Continuation of the grand theme: Google doesn’t do content, they make it easier for you to find it, create it, share it. They don’t do social networks, just make the ones you already use better/easier.”

o“Wayt King: 1994: Microsoft “embraces and extends” Netscape’s Big Idea (the browser) with Explorer. This basically killed Netscape, over time. Nov 2007: GOOG “embraces and extends” Facebook’s Big Idea (the social graph) with OpenSocial.”

· Marc Andreessen (Ning) has a great blog post that helps understand how OpenSoclal works, quotes from it:

o “roles” different “providers” can play within this “ecosystem”; quoting from it:

• "Containers" -- social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and...
• "Apps" -- applications that want to be embedded within containers -- for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide

o “With the Facebook platform, only Facebook itself can be a "container" -- "apps" can only run within Facebook itself. In contrast, with Open Social, any social network can be an Open Social container and allow Open Social apps to run within it.”

However there is a big missing piece here; I guess it would have been too much to expect but: what about data flowing from one container to other through those apps? What about friend’s status being presented to me regardless of how many containers has an app to peruse to aggregate it for me? And while we are at this, how is Google going to monetize this? (data and metadata, I would guess)

My bet is that something like the above is coming; and this is only Google’s 1^st step…. a great 1^st step strategically put forward to offer a very attractive alternative to Facebook and meant to gain support from both developers of apps (ala Slide) and social networks (ala Ning) alike.

What do you think?

Filiberto Selvas