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November 07, 2007
OpenSocial - film at 11
I'm sort of bemused by all the enthusiasm I've seen over Google releasing OpenSocial. Here in Berlin this has been the subject of several sessions and I've been scratching my head wondering about why this is such a good thing.
So, I'm pleased to see Tim O'Reilly write the following blog post as it echoes what I've been thinking over the past couple of days. And in particular this quote:
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 I'm wondering just how often the social network will actually want to infuse new applications from external developers into their platform. I can't really imagine a platform like Xing letting developers write applications that can be dropped into the platform - and Xing is an OpenSocial partner. The fact is that any platform like Xing wants to maintain control over what its members can do on the platform (after all it's the paying members they are after). On the other side even though it may be a sound development model to make sure your own applications inside the platform are built using a standard API - I again cannot imagine Xing wanting one of their own applications to be deployed onto another platform.
But I can see the true value in having the same contact list inside say Xing and LinkedIn with a neat icon telling me from where my contacts come from.
Ho hum for now.
Posted by Matthew at November 7, 2007 09:05 PM
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