Social Graph

The question of identity management was fluffed. I could get no more sense than David Berlind on this central issue. OpenID anyone? No enterprise is going to allow applications onto their networks that don’t have clear, unequivocal and auditable ID management policies. This is now an issue the Mercury News says privacy activists have pounced upon. How does it get resolved?

A decade ago, the approach to thwart an upstart was to bundle, give product away for free and use your girth to squash a smaller rival. Think Microsoft meets Netscape. Today, it’s a different game. Open protocols rule. The end game is still the same though. Under the guise of being open you can line up every competitor of a rival and still potentially squash the upstart. You think MySpace is really doing OpenSocial for the greater good? Of course not, MySpace is scared to death of Facebook’s growth rates.

APIs are great and they get developers jazzed, but they don’t mesh all that well with my prism of the world. I’m more of a business strategy, art of war, follow the money type of guy. Luckily, this OpenSocial effort has a big chunk of all of the above. Google is really deploying an art of the API strategy and where things go from here is going to be worth watching.

True–to a degree. Google is really surrounding Facebook, trying to rope off Microsoft’s ad network, which powers Facebook, and grab more inventory for its own network. It’s not a zero sum game, but the strategy is notable. The OpenSocial initiative by its very nature implies that Google and its merry band of social sites is open (therefore good) and Facebook is more closed (less good). That’s why you’re getting these AOL-Facebook analogies as Marc Andreessen notes are off the mark.

There are 50 Million Facebook users who don't know what OpenSocial APIs are...and don't care. There are about 5,000 tech bloggers and developers who think it is a revolution that will "Checkmate" Facebook and leave them with no moves.

Google is one huge data magnet. All of the services they provide are collecting massive amounts of data.

OpenSocial is largely based on open standards and there's only minor developer lock-in.  Overall, it actually seems pretty safe to do a lot of your social application development using OpenSocial.  It uses the essential browser open standards of XML, HTML, Javascript, and the data formats are all ATOM and RESTful/WOA.

OpenSocial is a real doorway to social networking data portability as well as potential security holes. A site that supports OpenSocial applications provides that application with all the people data in that user's account.  Their own info as well as their friends.

OpenSocial applications provides that application with all the people data in that user's account.  Their own info as well as their friends.  This can be used to export user's social data from sites that don't support themselves directly and it could even be used to knit together a person's social data across other social sites that support OpenSocial, with properly designed 3rd party apps.  But it also opens the door to security problems and expect to see that security, cross-site scripting, and exploits become an issue over time, as it always does when platforms open up to the rest of the world. Update: Michael Arrington has reported that the first OpenSocial app has now been hacked.

Google almost certainly thinks OpenSocial will ultimately be very good for Google, if not outright bad for a few others (probably Facebook).  While the openness is encouraging, if OpenSocial is successful, Google has a plan to make that success work for it. Those plans may not always be to the benefit of everyone playing under the OpenSocial umbrella.  User beware.