Google's Open Interface for Social Networks

Submitted by prodosh on 31 October, 2007 - 21:46.

On Thursday, 1 November, 2007 Google
will be announcing their "OpenSocial" API for social networks. This
will be a standard API developers of third party applications for
social networks will be able to use, provided the social network
platform enables it. It will mean that 3rd party developers will be
able to deploy their Google API standard application on all platforms
supporting it.

But which networks are planning to support it? Of course Google's own Orkut will support it. GigaOm reports that XING, Ning, hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo and Friendster are
on board and will be supporting it. This means that OpenSocial is going
to be interesting for developers of external social networking
applications, because they will be able to cover a significant
population of social networkers.

There are a lot of questions that start coming up:

Will it be possible for an application to form a user group across different networks?
Will this open the door for "meta" social networks - networks of social networks?
What kind of model will the API be using?
Will there be adequate safeguards for privacy?
Will Google have a lock-in to provide its own advertising for the
applications? Or will they be open and give the application vendors a
choice of who they want to get their advertising from?
Will OpenSocial be able to put a brake on Facebook's explosive growth?

The Google announcement will provide some answers and more clues. In the end the application developers will probably have a lot
of influence on the success of the API.

What is it going to mean for the Facebook competitors? Will this be
the one that will help them fight off Facebook? What will the
dependency on Google mean for social networking business models?

Information about OpenSocial (not yet live - available after announcement): http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial