Julianna
It was only a matter of time, but today Google announced the launch of OpenSocial, it’s foray into social networking. According to the site “OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.”
What exactly does this mean? Now a developer can use Google’s API to create an application that will work on all OpenSocial participating sites – to date this list is already quite long and includes Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.
Creating open accessibility is definitely a good thing, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out long term. B.L. Ochman has a great post on the launch including quotes from other bloggers predicting whether OpenSocial will work or not. Want more information? Check out coverage from both Mashable and TechCrunch.
Let’s hope we see cross network interop. That would be my dream come true. OpenAPI for all! Standards!!!!!