Happy birthday OpenSocial!

It's a year since some of the biggest names in social networking joined to collaborate on interoperability. What have they achieved in that time?

I'll admit I was sceptical from the start. My first read of the press release announcing OpenSocial had me seeing sheep throwing applications, popular on Facebook at the time, proliferating around other places on the web were I conducted more serious business. Well, Facebook was a notable absentee from the OpenSocial iniative actually, but I feared that the mold for "social applications" had been set.

One year later I can see I needn't have been so concerned. The OpenSocial Foundation, the group formed to help manage the development community around its open API (Application Programming Interface) standards says that millions of web users are already getting real benefit, with many more OpenSocial apps planned -- the next batch of which will hit LinkedIn users within a month.

But who knows about the apps that exist? And who can see the benefits they are getting?

An early OpenSocial manifestation was Google Friend Connect, a rival to Facebook Connect which planned to enable website owners to embed the social graph elements from existing socnets into their own sites. It would allow MySpace users to collect on your site and share details of things they liked about it with their MySpace friends. The appeal of 100 million MySpace members being able to better use your own website was clear to many website owners, all of whom rubbed their hands with glee waiting for the code to arrive. Amid much fanfare and the inevitable "who will win? Google or Facebook?" questions, nothing came of it: I am not aware of one GFC implementation (incidentally, it never took off for Facebook Connect either, with no more than a handful of live implementations thus far). The promise remains unfulfilled. And that was one of the first and better sounding OpenSocial applications.

LinkedIn has recently launched some application to its business-focused social network, but beyond some file sharing and collaborative stuff limited in scale, no one would know that OpenSocial underpins them. In fact, it's not very apparent why OpenSocial would need to underpin them, as they are sitting on a social network where the sharing capabilities with other members of your social graph already exist.

One year on, and in a world where many social networks have grown by 50% during that year, the impact of a very well-supported (AOL, Bebo, hi5, Google, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Yahoo!...), formal interopability group to get them all talking has been, unfortunately, negligable.

My view is that the group seems to be shying away from the biggest challenges, but the ones that REALLY bring benefits to users of its members' sites. In spite of supporting OpenID and developing OpenAuth, nearly all of the sites above still require you to set up and administeran individual account, have a unique login and build your networks of friends from scratch each time. This is WAY more a chore to users than the miniscule benefits most of the developed apps bring. And yet we feel no closer now to seeing portable identities and social graphs than we did when all the mission statement and vision slides were first put up 12 months ago.

To my mind, this is THE single biggest inhibitor to the uptake and effectiveness of Web 2.0. That each site needs to take you through a broadly similar registration process only to start you off from Social Square One again is what is stopping people signing up for interesting new niche social networks and from getting full use of those they are already on. Cracking this challenge would have been a great first birthday present to OpenSocial from its founder members.

So in spite of having the tools to do it, why is the OpenSocial Foundation and its members content to put their focus into apps which show you what books your business contacts are reading (LinkedIn app, November 2008)? Maybe because some of the big names behind the initiative "own" all the users and actually DON'T wish to make the Web 2.0 open enough for people to be able to choose which sites they visit without some barriers in the way...?

I'd be interested in your take.

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