OpenSocial: It's the data, stupid 19 Nov 2007

Tim O'Reilly points out some interesting holes in the logic behind OpenSocial (Google's attempt at making social networking sites play nicely together). Unfortunately, it seems that OpenSocial will only allow developers to port their apps / widgets between the different social networking sites (that is, it will mean that developers no longer have to write different versions of the same widget for each social networking site they want to support). It won't, however, allow developers to build applications that can remix / mashup data from multiple social networking sites. How disappointing. As O'Reilly points out:

"If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that's a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don't want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.

"And data mobility is a key to that. Syndication and mashups have been key elements of Web 2.0 -- the ability to take data from one place, and re-use it in another. Heck, even Google's core business depends on that ability -- they take data from every site on the web (except those that ask them not to via robots.txt) and give it new utility by aggregating, indexing, and ranking it.

"Imagine what would have happened to Google maps if instead of supporting mashups, they had built a framework that allowed developers to create mapping applications across Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google as a way of competing with MapQuest. Boring! That's the equivalent of what they've announced here."

Yes, it seems that OpenSocial is only really useful to developers (since it makes cross platform development easy). It offers no real benefits to end-users however, since the friend lists that they currently manage across several different social networking sites will remain trapped within these walled gardens.