What's happened to OpenSocial?

Google announced OpenSocial to much fanfare last October. Within weeks almost everyone, except Facebook, had jumped on the bandwagon, promising a fully social web. Ten months later, what has happened to it?

I will admit to having been something of a sceptic when Google first trumpeted the concept behind OpenSocial. OK, an open platform for allowing widgets, pieces of code which add functionality to websites, to be shared across websites to bring the features of one website to another painlessly, sounded good in concept. But I had just turned my back on MySpace, one of OpenSocials largest supporters, because of the infuriatingly childish widgets on that site; and I was beginning to get as frustrated by the "social applications" that had started to choke Facebook. Why would I want such puerile wastes of time spread across the whole web?

Not many others on the web shared my view, however, as Google soon showed an impressive list of supporters, including LinkedIn, Plaxo, Hi5, Ning and Salesforce.com and others joining MySpace. Even Ecademy said they would be supporting it.

In spite of all the excitement and big names behind it, though, my cynicism stayed during the early weeks as I waited for the euphoria to turn into useful applications that website owners could use and show their users benefit from.

Ten months later, I am still waiting.

Last November I added a Google News Alerts to make sure that I didn't miss any announcements on such useful applications and successful deployments. I have just been away for a few days and checking through the news I have received on "open social", it is all reports of local celebrities that opened social clubs or towns whose social services offices are going to open later, rather than news that the biggest names on the web are deliverying on the early OpenSocial promises.

Taking a look at the Google developer blogs on OpenSocial, it seems full of the results of surveys asking how useful people would find it, plus a schedule of OpenSocial related events at last months Google I/O developer conference, but nothing on released or even forthcoming applications.

A common way of sharing widgets and applications with social elements to them, taking your list of friends with you wherever you go, showed promise. But has OpenSocial fizzled out before it's begun?

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz