.10 Reasons Why OpenSocial Will Be Very Beneficial
OpenSocial is a crackling new public universal internet platform design that lets social networks (for lack of a better word) allow embeddable app providers (for lack of a better word) to avail the social underpinnings of the hosting social network simply for the benefit of the person who has chosen to embed the app in a profile page on that network.
I think OpenSocial will be very beneficial. Here are 10 reasons why.
- Its de facto purpose is to be a universally functional data sharing structure, and its de real purpose is to be so good that Facebook and proprietary platforms do not inherit the web. These goals are very well-aligned and will be difficult to pervert.
- OpenSocial is so well-backed (Google, MySpace, Bebo, Six Apart, Hi5, LinkedIn, etc.) it cannot be ignored. Yet, it’s so well backed a single party, not even Google, will be able to control its growth and purpose.
- It will stave off the Balkanization of the web into platforms, which means we as an industry may only need to develop for 3-5 major platforms (including mobile) vs. dozens.
- APIs may all use friendly XML markup, but not all APIs are the same. Hardly. Right now the situation with APIs could be compared to Romance languages. They use the same alphabet, but all the words are different. OpenSocial APIs will be akin to using the same alphabet and the same words.
- The ‘platform’ of OpenSocial is closer to the middle of the internet, where business, open standards, and internet experimentation meet, not off within one compound that offers in-and-out privileges.
- It will quickly ossify the universal data encapsulation of the social graph. (I always liked Mark Z’s term ’social graph.’) Friend lists, event feeds, public calendars, personal profile values, etc., etc. should, in reality, all be highly accessible yet with highly respected and standardized privacy settings so users have complete control of what they share with whom. OpenSocial will hasten the formalizing of these data structures much faster than 25 rival entities.
- Since its charter is so firmly open, even if, for example, Google makes quick hooks that allow for Google CheckOut or AdSense usage (which it absolutely should) those hooks will be equally easy for PayPal, Amazon, Yahoo, Lookery (what up Scott ;), etc. to use as well. They will be open to all.
- Everyone—App makers, social networks, everyday people—will be able to get the most out of everything the whole system can collectively offer. Facebook showed the potential of formalizing the social graph. OpenSocial, with Facebook, will get it to escape velocity.
- It will challenge the excellent Facebook platform, and any other platform provider, to make its offering the best it can be, which will then force the OpenSocial platform to be as good as it can be. Real, emotional public challenge for superiority is good in technology.
- The days of screen-scraping-as-an-API need to end. Storing people’s passwords for other services is digital upskirting and fosters bad user habits. Standards will make the data open faster.
Here are 3 reasons why OpenSocial will be problematic.
- Security will be up to the container provider (i.e., the social network), which means if it is not vigilant, slippery tentacles of nefariousness may be able to wiggle past them in all types of new and unforeseen ways.
- As open as it will likely be, Google will be able to take advantage of its central role. Google currently has so much information already on users and their actions, each new subset makes it all more valuable and all the harder to not exploit. So what seems like ether data to the small nodes most all of us are, becomes meaningful (and lucrative) when viewed at Google-scale.
- The inexorable extensibility of its charter may make it a troublesome beast in five-plus years’ time as online sociality may grow in ways far deeper then we can currently grasp. Five years ago the term Social Network hardly existed, same with syndicated blog feed, friend news, proximity aware, etc. Things may be forced opened that should remain closed.
To get yourself up-to-speed quickly on this very new reality, read entries on OpenSocial by Marc Andreessen, Dave McClure and Anil Dash.
The OpenSocial homepage was supposed to go live Thursday.
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Great post, Ted! Couldn’t agree more. Some excellent strategic gamesmanship by Google, and even Rupert Murdoch who did a bait and switch with his TechCrunch40 platform announcement. Could they have purposefully helped bid up the price on Facebook just to entangle Microsoft just before announcing their master stroke?
It’s good for the app developers and good for the members of open social for sure. Many of the app developers are resource constrained, and this will let them put their apps into many social nets with less work, and let many social nets benefit from the great creativity that the platforms are unleashing.
One challenge with any collaborative effort of standard building is whether it can make quick decisions when members of the coalition may have different interests. We’ll see how this plays out - it didn’t work well for Magic Carpet in the federated identity efforts of a few years ago. But even with the three simple APIs first announced, there is enough richness for app developers to do interesting things.
The next question will be how the social nets support app developers making money.
You’ve nailed it from a developer’s standpoint, as well as a few users’ views. A few other considerations
1) Applications may not work smoothly across multiple social graphs. Applications are designed to ‘hook’ into the network and connections of people, what happens when these social graphs (Say linkedin and myspace) how do these streams cross on a single app?
2) User data privacy still not safe. With applications (and containers) gaining access to new graphs, personal data, and logins, the spread of user information is not clearly known
3) Who’s going to police and protect? With all the vendors moving forward to build, who’s going to ensure we’re going to make user data, (and company data) safe. With many systems connecting, the risk of them all falling increases.
Users will own their data…. We working on that now.
^are
This is really good. I am really glad you brought up the privacy/security issues, which seem to be a big concern for regular people adopting services on the web.
Another avenue is this starts to open all social web sites and services to interact so to ease people’s use of services and help them connect with their social graph (still sounds like what people need after they have been burned by a social network site).
There are many more millions of active users of services around the web than are in Facebook and people have their preferences for different services for different uses, but being able to connect the services and tools together is a great benefit.
The biggest concern is mapping the access to content from one services (particularly if a person has access to that information open only to a selective group, or even open to all the collective members of a service but not outside that service) and having access to that information respected in and across other services. The importance of knowing one Joe Smith from another Joe Smith, or even that one Joe Smith on FaceSpace is the same as Joe Smith of MyBook. Once we get outside of people like ourselves these become common concerns that real people have.
[...] Developers: Ted, CEO of Dogster compares and contrasts the announcement. [...]
[...] R really loves it. & I would just stay tuned to Marc Andreessen’s blog as he seems to get this the most [...]
i’m really curious to see how this plays out from a user experience/design perspective. what will it mean to develop an application for/across related but dissimilar sites? both bebo and linkedin take advantage of aspects of the social graph, for sure, but one’s a prius and the other’s a scooter, and i wouldn’t use the same cupholder for both (ok, mangled metaphor, but you take my point…)
overall, though, i’m just happy the big guys have a new way to wage, because you’re right, ted — that’s always the fastest road to real progress around here. usually, anyway — here’s hoping this one ends better than the first round of the browser wars did!
great stuff, especially points 1.6, 1.9, and 2.1
nice job ted :)
- dave
yo ted,
i think people just love the idea of google rescuing the world from facebook world domination. the concept of opensocial is good, but don’t believe the hype. the details aren’t quite right yet (and the devil is *always* in the details)
my extended comments here: http://jimy.wordpress.com/2007/11/02/notes-on-opensocial/
[...] Ted Rheingold api, google, opensocialShare This [...]
Jim
Imagine if instead have have to do direct connections to API, you could instead have an extension that remained directly connected to the 3rd part API. Technically id doesn’t offer yu much as the original API should have 24/7 availability, but with OpenSocial you could embed your ‘App’ into a newtwork, which is really just a socket directly convery information for that user account, bout out and in, in a manner that is is controalled by a single server master, or prehaps a client-based master. Now imagine if your software had an extension for every major netowrk, that you could install for each user of yours that had a profile with one of the networks.
I see the benefits of OpenSocial is not an App being in the SocNet, but a network of related apps being all the SocialNetoworks transferring data in and out via a semi-permanent socket. In the end out data will be much more interesting that in data as users will be able to move off interfacing with the SocNet as it will be easier to interface with their MegaMeta interface that controls them all.
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[...] Dogster Inc. Company Blog » Archive » 10 Reasons Why OpenSocial Will Be Very Beneficial Another avenue is this starts to open all social web sites and services to interact so to ease people’s use of services and help them connect with their social graph (still sounds like what people need after they have been burned by a social network sit (tags: blog.dogster.com 2007 mes10 dia4 OpenSocial orkut security blog_post) [...]
[...] Dogster Inc. Company Blog » Archive » 10 Reasons Why OpenSocial Will Be Very Beneficial [...]
Ted,
You need to pontificate more often.
Lots of good thoughts here especially #3 on the problematic side.
I think the hype needs to die down a bit first and see what folks build.
[...] Developers: Ted, CEO of Dogster compares and contrasts the announcement. [...]