OpenSocial is growing up fast. What started out as Google's effort to create a common application programming interface for developing small applications that can tap into multiple social-networking services is becoming a full-fledged development platform.
(Credit:
Ben Metcalfe)
According to the OpenSocial Foundation, it has garnered a potential audience of 600 million users, with 7,500 compliant applications developed so far and 20 containers (hosts for social applications) supporting the APIs within the last 12 months. The Google spin-off incorporated itself as a nonprofit foundation to ensure support from a broad range of social-networking competitors, including Yahoo, MySpace, Hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, and Xiaonei, China's largest social network.
Giants Facebook and Microsoft, however, have so far not jumped on the OpenSocial bandwagon. Facebook has 125 million active users around the world, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg is seeking to establish Facebook as an "open" application platform and so far is holding off on endorsing OpenSocial. Facebook investor Microsoft, which last week introduced a social dimension to its Windows Live platform, is in the midst of rolling out a cloud services development platform.
David Glazer, director of engineering at Google
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET News )The large OpenSocial contingent, plus Facebook and Microsoft, are all advocates of open Web standards, but they are in a competition for developers. "Everyone doing social stuff is interoperable at some level of the stack," said David Glazer, director of engineering at Google. "Facebook and Microsoft are using a big chunk of the open stack. Open architectures are all converging. It's moving fast--last year, there was no such thing as a social platform."
He pointed to collaborative efforts on OpenID, OAuth, and Portable Contacts as examples of open Web standards that are in various stages of adoption. But the OpenSocial notion of "write once, run anywhere" doesn't fly without Facebook and Microsoft joining in, or the three major platforms providing a level of interoperability and compatibility beyond common Web standards.
OpenSocial is also being positioned as more than a platform for basic widgets (gadgets in Google parlance). "We are going to see application-to-application hooks, which will blur the difference between things in the box (container) and lots of different surfaces working together," Glazer said. "We will definitely see enterprise applications."
There might come a day when Microsoft Office or Google Docs & Spreadsheets are among the top OpenSocial applications, said Alan Hurff, senior vice president of engineering at MySpace and president of the Board of OpenSocial. However, enterprises more slowly adopt new technologies, such as social networks and mashups, and must have a return-on-investment justification to fund deployments.
Some of the future improvements to the OpenSocial platform will include better development tools (Visual Studio-like tool to speed development), payment platforms, analytics, cross-container portability, and mobile-application support. "We need to make it easier for developers to build applications, reach users, and make money. From where we started, the platform has gone a long way in the right direction," Glazer said.
In regards the OpenSocial code, version 0.9 is due out at the beginning of next year. Glazer was asked to speculate on when version 1.0 would be released. "The functionality of 0.9 feels 1.0-worthy. But we don't want to stretch beyond what we know," he said.
OpenSocial is still an infant, but it has big ambitions to stretch out as a major application development platform for the cloud.
David Glazer: Friend Connect is in line with Google's goal of enabling a more open Web.
(Credit: CNET News.com)On Friday's Gillmor Gang podcast, Google's point person on Friend Connect, David Glazer, took questions from the gang, which included Steve, Marc Canter, Robert Anderson, Mike Arrington, Dana Gardner, and myself.
Much of the conversation centered on Facebook's suspended participation in Google Friend Connect. Glazer said he expects Facebook and Google to make peace but didn't want to give a time frame for a resolution.
Regarding efforts by Google, Facebook, and MySpace to provide some element of data portability, Glazer said they are complementary, based on what is known about the APIs so far, which isn't much.
Glazer maintained that Friend Connect is in line with Google's goal of enabling a more open Web, which also has the potential to improve Google's bottom line. Sites and applications that use Friend Connect could also serve Google ads. "It's just an example of how when more people have more reasons to do things online, it can be good for Google," he said.
The first wave of applications built on Google's OpenSocial APIs is set for liftoff in the next few weeks as MySpace, Orkut, and Hi5 make the final push to release their software.
David Glazer, director of engineering at Google
(Credit: Dan Farber)I spoke with David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, at the Graphing Social Patterns conference, who told me that it's "pizza time" for the developers, meaning they are putting in long hours to deliver the apps sooner than later.
The OpenSocial APIs allow developers to create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds without modification for compliant platforms. The OpenSocial APIs are in version .7, after starting at .5, if you can follow the versioning logic. Whatever the case, future iterations will be backward compatible with the .7 spec, Glazer said.
Google has also introduced a Social Graph API, which exposes information about the public connections between people (expressed by XFN and FOAF markup languages) and other publicly declared connections accessible to developers. Glazer said that the Social Graph API is on a slower track than the OpenSocial API. "We are expecting it to be a long, slow ramp," Glazer said.
It's difficult to set user expectations for pervasive social applications because most users have no expectations about where to give control and allow for discovery, Glazer said. The use cases have not been well defined for how social graph data should be used in a way that protects privacy and provides enough granularity and ease of use to satisfy a broad range of users. "We'll just let the savvy developers build on it and see what works," Glazer said.
The barriers to injecting the social graph into the core of the Web aren't technological. OATH, OpenID, OpenSocial APIs, and the Social Graph API can be combined to provide the underlying infrastructure for unleashing the social Web fabric, Glazer said. It's people getting comfortable with the user experience of the social Web, just as they did in a past era with the experience of Caller ID.
- prev
- 1
- next
