Tim Almond

Some time ago, I blogged about Noserub, Dirk Olbertz’s project aimed ataddressing open social networking.  The idea of having open social networking is that instead of having to have a multitude of IDs, platforms and so forth, you can do it all from one ID.

I’ve been watching the presentation from Google about the OpenSocial APIs (Application Programming Interface) and whilst it doesn’t go as far, it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

There seems to be two ways to work with the data, either externally or internally. The current push is towards the internal - building applications that sit inside Orkut, Hi5,  LinkedIn and others that have signed up (note: Facebook have not). The benefit to developers is that applications can be built to run in all of them with little modification. From a developer’s point of view, instead of then choosing Facebook vs LinkedIn as his target for development, it instead becomes (Orkut + Hi5 + LinkedIn + Others) vs Facebook. How the numbers stack up, I’m not sure, but it’s definitely a challenge to Facebook.

I’m going to have a read on it, but I’m more interested in when the REST interface gets documented (coming soon, apparantly) which should allow mining of private data from external applications.

Tags: Software Development, Google //