OpenSocial doesn't knock down walls

Google's OpenSocial API is an interesting move, and it's great for developers. Common APIs across platforms have always helped speed of development and adoption, whether the platform in question has been the hardware, operating system, virtual machine or web browser. Now there's a lot more reason to develop a Social Networking application -- your audience has just got a lot larger.

It's not quite as simple as that, though. What OpenSocial doesn't do is stop current Social Networks being walled gardens -- if you're on LinkedIn you still won't be able to add someone on Facebook as a friend, and hence you won't be able to share an OpenSocial application with them.

Walled gardens can only go so far. If you're old enough to have had a GSM mobile in the early 90s, you may remember when you couldn't send an SMS from one network to another, so no-one used it. Now it's one of the networks' biggest money-spinners. Email would be a non-starter if you couldn't send a message to someone who had a different ISP. Social networks will remain something of a plaything until my system can talk to yours.

There are people trying to build open social networks, where there is no central server, but instead we're all masters of our own small domain. Technologies like OpenID, FOAF and good old RSS make such a thing possible, but it's not as straightforward as just signing up for a new account on a web site. Ask most users of Facebook to find hosting space, install a web application and configure it and most of them just won't bother. That's why the existing social network sites need to adopt these open standards and allow interoperability of data, not just APIs.

OpenSocial is good for developers as developers, but for social networks to be good for you as an individual and as a business, they need to be much more open than this.