Marc's Voice

Google to open up - and give Facebook a run for it’s open platform money

Michael Arrington is reporting that some secret meeting happened yesterday at Google disclosing to “some luminaries” plans to offer open APIs that will expose Orkut’s and iGoogle’s profiles and social graphs - but which will eventually unite all of Google’s apps and services together.

3rd party developers will be able to use these APIs to build containers and ‘Gadgets - which can tap into these social graphs and profile data of their users - who have accounts on Orkut and iGoogle now - and conceivably the entire suite of Google apps - in the future. What I can’t wait for is:

- to find out where my friends are - on Maps

- to find out what feeds my friends are reading - in Reader (kudos to Rojo for that one)

- to find out what tags my friends are using, what videos they’re watching, what web sites they’re viewing and which friends we have in common.

- one could also extrapolate all sorts of presence/status/update data flying around and a glorious shared pool of social graph info (completely protected AGAINST spammers - of course!)

In other words Google is “bringing social to software“.

All software is about people and ALL software will have these features - in the future. In the mean time - you can come and download your OWN platform and go for it. It’s called PeopleAggregator.

You don’t need to have a cluster of Solaris machines and Opsware running.

I have to wonder how silly Yahoo feels. They bought Flickr, delicious, Upcoming, ODDPost, MyBlogLog - the list keeps going - but only Flickr has had any effect on their core offerings. I thought Yahoo was positioning themselves as the OPEN solution to Google’s closed scenario?

Well what ever happened with APIs to MyYahoo? Where’s Yahoo’s social graph and social networking strata? My mind is trembling in fear and throbbing in excitement - at the same time! Now what is Microsoft gonna do?

And lets not leave SixApart out of this mix!

Ultimately MySpace will have to do SOMETHING open or else they’ll get positioned into the ‘closed’ corner?

This whole ‘open social networking‘ meme is morphing into a ‘bringing social to software‘ meme - which is what the panel is about in Paris for LeWeb3.

Meanwhile - congrats to Google.