Google throwing its weight behind OpenSocial

November 1st, 2007

By Justin Smith

As everyone knows, Google tomorrow is announcing its “OpenSocial” social network platform APIs with participating social networks LinkedIn, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut, Ning, and more. You can find interesting perspectives on the announcement from Mark Andreessen (screenshots here) and the rest of Techmeme.

In talking to people around the valley today, most people are very intrigued by the notion of OpenSocial platforms across the web, but many questions remain:

Google is announcing this tomorrow, but how long will it be before OpenSocial applications and social networks are in public production?
Will OpenSocial APIs actually lead to any significantly new compelling applications?
What about performance? OpenSocial is a JavaScript API, so many widgets on a page may want to make many HTTP requests.

Obviously OpenSocial has the potential to become a major “platform” for SNAPs. Dave Winer says, “Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don’t work.” We’ll see how this one goes starting tomorrow…

[tags]facebook,google,opensocial[/tags]

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2 Responses to “Google throwing its weight behind OpenSocial”

moe Says:
November 1st, 2007 at 2:37 am
Since it’s Google you have to give all this hype some attention but I still have some doubts. All the new social platforms are popping up in a reactive mode so how thought out could they be? Facebook took time to develop theres and probably went through months of QA. All these other companies have been in reacting mode for the last five months.

However, it is safe to say that the battle for the social platform has begun. Good quote from Wiener btw.
Brandkraft Online-Marketing » Googles OpenSocial in der öffentlichen Meinung Says:
November 2nd, 2007 at 4:33 am
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