Why OpenSocial Is so Exciting

Google has just announced that they are opening three new APIs that allow developers to access profile information, friends information and activities.

While most folks are viewing this as Google's answer to Facebook Applications, (an either brilliant or misguided answer), I see something else.

I see for the first time ever a major web player making a serious gesture toward solving the web's identity problem.  Not only the Google websites, but already LinkedIn, Friendster, Oracle, SalesForce and Ning are already on board.  If Facebook's closed system is the AOL in this equation, Google is the web.  We all know who won at first and who won in the long run!

“Obviously, we would love for them to be part of it,” Joe Kraus, director of product management at Google said of Facebook. 

Hah!

Thanks to these APIs, essential Web 3.0 functionality like universal reputation, single signon, and portable identity attributes are sure to be on the horizon.  OK, so it might be awhile before all the hard work put in over the past 4 years by people like the FOAF ers,  OpenID, Sxip, etc. finally comes to fruition here.  But to me, this signals the end of the walled garden as the only available option online.  Glory glory hallelujah!

Comments

[Andy Beard]

Google has had a lot of their own APIs in the past, which were really useful for webmasters, but they took them away or made them less useful.

If introducing an API wasn't more useful for Google than their competitors, they wouldn't create it.

Hijacking someone else's trademark can't be excused, and a universal API means only one API you have to program your robots to understand.

[Jon Leander]

We’re a mid size business. We use CRM and Sales Force Automation from http://www.LongJump.com. We’re very happy with their products and service.

[Edward]

so Iz, it's a year later, is it still exciting?

it's nice to have a common widget architecture, but we don't really have a common identity architecture (yet)