Google goes Social

Google entered the Social Networking scene by releasing OpenSocial APIs. When Facebook converted itself from a social networking site to a “platform” by opening up its APIs for developers, the major problem was it was restricted only to Facebook!!

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites, The mantra being “write once, run everywhere”. Many websites like Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING are implementing OpenSocial. The most interesting ones being Salesforce.com and Oracle which are not traditionally social networking website but using OpenSocial to extend social functionality.

It is almost certain that Facebok will not embrace this open standard, but a third party tool to support OpenSocial on Facebook is always possible :)

Developers can use the APIs to create Google gadget, which runs inside a “container” (the social networking website supporting OpenSocial). Development can be through Google Gadget Editor and can be hosted with Google taking advantage of the Gadget’s caching technology. Currently most of the applications run inside a sandbox.

So, with a chance to reach around 200M users in dozens of countries (sans the 20M Facebook users), the future of OpenSocial looks great.
Google is acting as an adhesive and creating De facto standards for communications across social networks. Overall its a great opportunity of developers to leverage the social networking data and create killer apps!!

For more details: http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/