My blog attracts the kind of nerds who actually understand what’s going on with OpenSocial, Facebook and the world of open social networking. One of those nerds is Julian Bond of Ecademy. Julian is a far sited individual who worked with us on FOAFnet - to utilize FOAF to facilitate moving user’s data between systems - back in 2004.

Another nerd is Adrian Chan (of Gravity7) who I met a few years back on-line and we’ve kept in touch.

So Julian and Adrian have sent me questions regarding OpenSocial that I thought I’d share with all of you. They point out that developers are wary of ANY new platform and trust Google - just about as far as they trust Microsoft or Apple

First up - an email question poised by Adrian:

1) Do you happen to know if google’s open social means they’re going to engage in a new social marketing and social analytics-based ad effort? seems logical but i dont have details…. this looks to be setting up a great new opportunity for social media designers to build cool apps for web content providers, media companies, event sites, you name it, w/o committing to a “platform”. but where I’d like to get my hands on the social analytics activity across the social network or graph would provide, contextualized perhaps with semantic and content meta data, and supplemented with metrics of graph and friend communication activity, reach, responsiveness, frequency, etc etc etc…. will google now own that? would it make sense to start a company to deliver the front end app and marketing tool rolled into one, or would google effectively roll that into its own ad and analytics offerings?

I replied to Adrian:

yes all that is completely wide open

ads

analytics

the social graphs

part of the equation is that the hosting SNSs have to participate. So I bet at first places like Friendster or Xing will treat it entirely different than - say Orkut of LinkedIn.

We’ll see what transpires.

But Google is not inserting themselves into the mix - I bet they see it as small potatoes.  They can do that because Google is coming from a place of power - with a $700 share price and a model which  is not based upon locking users into any specific portal UI.

Next up was a comment left by Julian Bond

2) The big question I have is whether this is a Google tax on development time, or whether it will be genuinely useful. And unfortunately we won’t know until a few months down the line. We certainly don’t know, a few hours *before* the real announcement.

Remember Google Base? Was there any point in spending time working with it?

—

Welll needless to say I never bought Google Base.  They developed it behind clsoed doors - even after I had come to them specifically talking about events, reviews and microcontent - yet they still ignored us.  And we saw what happened with Google Base right?

Nothing!

But this time - they learned their lesson and they asked in a bunch of us - and found out what we wanted - and actually gave it to us.  This whole OpenSocial architecture play is not finished either.

But I’ll have to kill you first before I can reveal any details.  You see - I AM disclosed and have signed an NDA.

Net net - if you are a Facebook developer you’d have to be an IDIOT not to support OpenSocial.  And if you are a social networking vendor - the walls are coming down and you’d better chose sides.

So lets see what MySpace, Bebo and the others will do.  Like I said before - you can assume PeopleAggregator - and our clients - will be supporting OpenSocial.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 10:58 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.