Webware

Google is ready to open up its iGoogle home page to the social world.

The company is expected to announce Wednesday that gadgets for iGoogle can now take advantage of the Open Social API to build social-networking features into the small little software programs that iGoogle users can use to customize their home pages, according to Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and experience. For example, gadgets will now be available for Flickr, YouTube, and social games like Scrabble.

Google opened up the Open Social API to iGoogle developers last year, but only in the "sandbox," a protected area for experimentation. If developers like what they see, it could help turn iGoogle from a personalized home page for "tens of millions of users," according to Mayer, into sort of a mini social network.

For example, friends (who have to be iGoogle users) can share YouTube videos that will appear automatically on the iGoogle home screen if you choose to embed that gadget on your home page. You can also access a "stream" of updates and see all the different types of content your friends have shared recently.

That's exactly what Facebook's News Feed does for folks on that social network. Google downplayed attempts to compare this service directly to other sites like Facebook, but "we'd like people to see all of the 'push' content that they would like to see on this page," Mayer said. She was referring to content that is regularly updated and delivered to the user, as opposed to search, where a user "pulls" information from Google.

iGoogle users in Australia have been using these social gadgets for about a week. Games and news dominate the first crop of Open Social gadgets on iGoogle, with chess, Scrabble, The New York Times, Huffington Post, and NPR represented among the initial 14 applications from third parties.

The new iGoogle Open Social gadgets let you keep track of what your friends are up to online.

(Credit: Google)

Since OpenSocial's release in 2007, a variety of applications have been developed through the program. While some of the applications are built for MySpace, and others are also available on Facebook--which has kept its distance from the Google-led platform--the majority of them unfortunately are designed for less popular social networks, such as Hi5, Orkut, and Ning.

Some OpenSocial apps, regardless, are worth trying out. From games to profile add-ons, I've found eight that I deem worth adding to a compatible social-network account.

8 OpenSocial apps

Centrl Centrl is a chat tool that enables you to communicate with friends across many social networks. It can be installed on MySpace, Orkut, Ning, Hi5, and elsewhere. Once installed, you can engage in a public chat with anyone or talk to individuals on a variety of social networks, including Facebook. The app also determines your location so you can find folks in your area.

I found Centrl chat to be simple and appealing. But considering that so many social networks have their own instant-messaging tool, don't expect Centrl to gain too much traction anytime soon.

Centrl shows you who's on across the world.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

MiniTweet MiniTweet is a simple OpenSocial app. The tool adds a small Twitter update box to your MySpace profile. You can pick a title and input your user name. MiniTweet then displays all your recent Twitter updates on your profile. At any time, you can view your Twitter page by clicking on your MiniTweet title. You can't update your status in the app, but it's still worth checking out.

MiniTweet displays your Twitter updates.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Google is apparently "getting ready to fully cast its social net over its web properties," according to TechCrunch, the latest signal being the automatic creation of a Google account when opening a YouTube account.

It's a clever, almost Microsoft-esque move designed to make Google the center of our social universe. It can't happen fast enough. But Google shouldn't stop with its own properties.

The social Web is currently a morass of mostly siloed choices. I can be on Facebook but also have to build a profile on LinkedIn, not to mention Digg, Slashdot, Bebo, Classmates.com, etc., etc. While we've seen marginal linkage start to form between these through initiatives such as OpenSocial, they don't get nearly far enough toward the one-stop social experience most of us want on the Web.

Yes, choice is good, so sometimes we assume a dizzying array of choices must be very good. Not so.

As I've argued before (PDF), what we need is not a myriad of choices but rather a limited, manageable set of quality choices. Markets trend toward such choice naturally by eliminating weak players and elevating strong competitors.

This is as it should be.

Fearful as I am of any one vendor controlling my Web experience, as Microsoft did for decades in desktop computing, I'm almost equally fearful of a disjointed Web experience that never really hits its stride because users are hamstrung among different social Web sites.

I want the Web to be just that: a connecting web, not an isolating one.

So, dominate me, Google. You've been a good steward of data and user experience thus far, albeit not without hiccups. Find some way to pull in my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social data to my Google profile. Just ask: I'll give it to you. I have better things to do than waste time schlepping between different social Web sites. Save me the bother.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

MySpace announced Monday a twofold partnership with Microsoft: first, a MySpace mobile application for Windows Mobile phones, and second, support for Microsoft's Silverlight technology in the News Corp.-owned social network's developer platform.

The Windows Mobile application will be available this summer for Windows Mobile 6.1 phones and then more broadly in the fall. It'll be preloaded on Windows Mobile phones manufactured by LG, too. The app joins existing MySpace mobile products for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Sidekick, Palm, and Nokia handsets.

As for the Silverlight announcement, this means that developers building applications for MySpace's platform--which is based on the Google-created OpenSocial standard--have access to Adobe Flash competitor.

The announcements themselves are fairly mundane. But here's what's really interesting: Microsoft has invested $240 million in Facebook, which was at one point the second-place name in social networking--behind MySpace. But while MySpace still has more users in the U.S., Facebook is now significantly bigger worldwide.

In recent months, perhaps as a reaction to Facebook's explosive growth and domination of the social-networking landscape, MySpace has been making numerous efforts to return to its roots as a music and media hub.

MySpace, Google, Yahoo, and other allies have settled on what they think should be in version 0.9 of OpenSocial, a standard designed to make it easier for programmers to write Web applications that will work on multiple Web sites.

The draft version of OpenSocial includes a number of new features to ease programmers' difficulties, according a blog post by MySpace architect Scott Seely. He describes some changes, though reserving most details for future posts, but here's MySpace's boiled-down list:

• OpenSocial Markup Language--gadget developers can create/modify templates by copying and pasting HTML

• API (application programming interface) for Albums--standard way apps look at a user's media (photos, songs, and movies) and allows developers to add/manage new albums

• Proxied content--OpenSocial developers can host applications on their own servers using tools they prefer such as Ruby, PHP, .NET

• Definition of fetch/cache/invalidate model--reduces load on development servers by stating which items can be stored by MySpace and other containers

• Simplified JS (JavaScript) API--reduces the amount of code one needs to write for an OpenSocial application

OpenSocial allies plan a developer release of OpenSocial 0.9 in January.

At Monday's Le Web 3 conference in Paris, Netvibes announced the launch of its latest version which adds support for Google's OpenSocial and Facebook Connect, alongside several new ways to view widgetized content.

The OpenSocial element may be one of the most interesting aspects, as it's now paired with Netvibe's Universal Widget API, allowing developers to create widgets that can pull information from a user's social network. In the example demoed at the conference, Netvibes showed off a weather widget which displayed the user's weather, along with that of their friends. The user didn't have to set up that friends list; it simply came over with their credentials from other social networks. The same back end could be used to make a couch-surfing widget where you get friends' listings when looking up flights or hotel reservations in a particular city.

For widgets, this kind of openness is a big deal. Typically widgets are a self-serving piece of Web code that provide a limited container of information. With Netvibes' system, this information can become more targeted and personalized even before you go in to make initial changes.

New look

Besides the OpenSocial integration, the biggest change users are likely to notice is the selection of new layouts which allow tall widgets to be displayed lengthwise. Users have several choices in preset layouts, and each widget is set up to span accordingly. This is mostly helpful for media rich widgets, which can now properly display 16:9 widescreen video content without having to scale it down to fit. It's also really great for landscape photos, and long-form written content.

Speaking of which, there are new ways to read blog content from widgets, including a new canvas view which loads up the page right inside of Netvibes without jumping you somewhere else. You're also able to format incoming RSS stories into what looks like a slideshow gallery and a headline ticker which creates a neat, if slightly useless scrolling marquee of incoming stories.

You can read about all the updates over at the Netvibes blog. Also, below is a video of what the theme switching looks like:

Yahoo is continuing to dribble out its open platform.

The company on Thursday added an eBay Anywhere application to the dashboard area of the new home page in testing. The eBay application allows users to monitor their buying and selling activities from the Yahoo home page. Other applications blessed by Yahoo include checking various e-mail in-boxes from the Yahoo home page, and down the road activity updates from social networks. The functionality isn't much different from what users can do with external applications built for Facebook or OpenSocial containers.

Yahoo supplied a video to show off the new home page since it is still in "bucket" testing, meaning that only random users will see the page, which was first unveiled in September. I am still waiting to be found by the randomizer.

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.

On Thursday MySpace hosted a developer event in its San Francisco offices to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the OpenSocial application platform. In the 378 days since its introduction at a Google campfire event, the open-source platform is now host to more than 600 million registered users across more than 7,500 different applications.

Google projects the number of registered users to hit more than 800 million by the first quarter of 2009 with recent OpenSocial implementation on big sites like Ning and LinkedIn. There are also foreign sites like Chinese social network Xiaonei, which joined up late Wednesday night and will introduce an additional 30 million users to OpenSocial applications.

Google took the chance to discuss plans for the upcoming 0.9 version of OpenSocial, which will feature a huge number of changes under the hood--many of which will improve the speed and overall efficiency of hosted apps. However, the biggest change for both users and developers will be the option to run multiple versions of an application at the same time. For developers this means they can have a premium or beta test version on top of their normal application and not have to worry about having an untested version go out to all their users. It also lets them offer up multiple versions for users to pick from--much like standard software.

OpenSocial 0.9 is available for testing today with a full developer release planned for January. As has been the case with previous releases, the open-source nature of the project means several weeks of developer discussions on proposed specifications followed by voting on the updated draft and a push out to participating sites before a new standard version is released.

Opensocial is on track to pull in close to 900 million registered users by the first quarter of 2009. Here you can see the make-up of users across various participating social networks.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET Networks)