OpenSocial: Not about Social Network Portability

If you have read any tech blog this week you could not miss the news: Google’s OpenSocial has gone live on Thursday. Considering the flood of posts about it one could easily think it was revolutionary.

So what is it about? Well, as far as I can tell, OpenSocial is a set of API’s for building applications that work on multiple websites which support them. In short terms: Widgets which could work everywhere.

Is the storm in the blogosphere justified? I don’t think so. There are just two benefits:

1. No proprietary code is used (just HTML and Javascript), so it’s more comfortable to develop applications that can run everywhere.
2. Every website can run those applications.

So yes, that’s different to Facebook where developers have to learn new proprietary code, though applications only run on Facebook itself. And that’s what it boils down to: Competition to Facebook, especially when considering the launch partners which include social networking sites like MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Friendster, and many more.

But are users benefitting from OpenSocial? Only if they want to run widgets on more than one social network, I think. OpenSocial is no solution to social network portability. I don’t even think that problem is targeted at all by it (see also Tantek Çelik’s post). That’s disappointing.

If you want to read more about OpenSocial I recommend these blog posts:

• Marc Andreessen
• Marshall Kirkpatrick
• Ted Rheingold