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Google OpenSocial: Tackle Facebook Platform headon

October 31, 2007 · Posted in India Social Networking, India portals 

Phew..Finished developing a moderate sized Django based app yesterday. A good coding session, in some ways, is like sex - intense and very fulfilling ;-)

Anyways, I digress.

So, the big news today is about Google’s OpenSocial platform - Google’s answer to the wildly popular Facebook platform. Reports of Google opening up Orkut via API came in earlier. However, first glimpses of the concept are emerging only today. And I’m totally taken by it. Google has partnered with other sites like Ning, LinkedIn, hi5, Salesforce etc. as part of the OpenSocial platform. Developers will now be able to use the OpenSocial API to plug into any of these sites and use the following functions:

1) Profile info (user info etc.)

2) Friend network (social graph)

3) Activity streams

This opens up so many, previously unthinkable, new possibilities for developers.  While the technical details are yet to be announced, it seems like such an approach will give a dimension of portability to the developer apps (of course, there may be some site specific tweaking that may be needed). The platform breaks down the ‘walled gardens’ that plague the Facebook platform currently. Moreover, from the sounds of it, the API seems to be a plug-in API instead of a web services API. Javascript and HTML is the only arsenal needed to tap into the API.

As we await additional details about the same, its difficult to mask my excitement about this platform. I wont be surprised to see some disruptive apps emerging.

What’s your take on the Opensocial platform ?
If you were able to access the Orkut user profile and social graph data, what are some of the apps you can conceive of ?


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2 Responses to “Google OpenSocial: Tackle Facebook Platform headon”

  1. Roj on November 8th, 2007 9:10 am

    Our company is developing with OpenSocial right now (amongst other social platforms). OpenSocial has a long way to go although - based on their mission to really provide a platform to multiple containers - this is understandable. It will not be Write Once, Run Anywhere kind of stuff. Instead, we can expect it to be a Write Once, Tweak Often (to satisfy the atomic needs of various networks). That’s how it will work.

  2. Unmesh Mayekar on November 14th, 2007 2:23 pm

    I tend to agree with Rodney Rumford who in his comparison (http://facereviews.com/2007/11/14/facebook-vs-google-opensocial/) points out that OpenSocial would at best be a dumbed-down version of any individual social network. There is no way that OpenSocial can offer the full set of rich API’s that each of its subscribing networks might be able to provide.

    My hope from OpenSocial is a single-signon solution for all the different networks so new websites like ours dont have to make users go through yet another registration process. We (SadakMap.com) recently released single-signon for Facebook allowing Facebook users to directly access SadakMap without going through the registration process.

    If OpenSocial were to provide a SSO API, we would gladly consider doing away with our own registration page.

    Regards,
    Unmesh - Founder, SadakMap.com
    SpotMeUrl: http://www.sadakmap.com/spotme/unmesh