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Is OpenSocial Social at All?

Started by Nick O'Neill · 10 months ago

There was a lot of hype surrounding the launch of OpenSocial. Mike Arrington reported about a “select group of fifteen or so industry luminaries [who] attended a highly confidential meeting at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to discuss the company’s upcoming p ... Continue reading »

5 comments

  • Geoff Livingston

    1 year ago

    Wow! Scathing -- and accurate -- commentary!
    reply
  • Ike

    1 year ago

    I'll know all I need to know once Orkut becomes OpenSocial compatible.
    reply
  • Danny

    1 year ago

    Canter has it completely wrong, but only because Google did such a poor job of defining OpenSocial that the blogosphere somehow assumed OpenSocial had something to do with social graph portability (hint: it doesn't).

    OpenSocial is simply a broadly defined abstraction for connecting social "containers" (e.g. platforms that manage a user's activity stream, friends and profile information) with social "applications" (e.g. web apps that manage this data and render inside containers).

    In that sense, OpenSocial is exactly what it is designed to be: an "open" standard for social applications (vs. the proprietary standard defined by Facebook).

    As to whether the standard is more than "OpenGadgets": anyone can sign up for OpenSocial sandbox access and see for themselves: as of today, the Orkut sandbox has OpenSocial 0.6 implemented and yes, OpenSocial apps exist today that embrace the "social and profile components of a site."

    And thanks to projects such as Shindig, OpenSocial apps are going to be running on more sites than people think.
    reply
  • Brian Breslin

    1 year ago

    Finally! I've been saying this for months. OpenSocial is closer to OpenGadgets or GoogleGadgets Platform for the web. We have to start distinguishing between a widget, and an actual App on these networks. One is far more robust than the other.
    Relatively complex applications can be built on the facebook social graph, the same case cannot be said for opensocial yet.

    Glad everyone isn't drinking all the google kool-aid/anti facebook kool-aid
    reply
  • Frank

    1 year ago

    I think OpenSocial might turn out to be more of an "open" Google Gadget standard. I think Google is just trying to do what Netvibes has been trying to do with the open UWA standard. However Google is, well, Google so they have a little more muscle. It will be interesting if they will be able to make the standard stick.
    reply

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