Tim O'Reilly writes on O'Reilly Radar:

While I like the direction of Google OpenSocial, not only may Google be too late, as Mark argues, I don't think they go far enough. A framework and a set of Google Gadgets for building "social applications" misses the point. We don't want to build more applications that look like Facebook applications. It isn't about a social UI. It's about deeper re-use of social data to enliven any application. Some of those applications may have a minimal UI, like Google's breakthrough search app. OpenSocial doesn't give us any of that. Ajax widgets are a halfway house, an attempt to sandbox the kinds of applications that can be created.

I completely agree. Don't get me wrong, I think Google OpenSocial is a great step forward to allowing gadget style applications (ala Facebook apps) to be run in a distributed environment. At the end of the day I don't want every application I interact with on the web to be via a mammoth social network. I do see OpenSocial adding value of being able to integrate small common applications across social networks. It scares me though as it seems like a slippery slope if web entrepreneurs no longer think about building standalone services, but only those that ride on the back of these networks. If the Web is the platform, then how is moving from one large silo to a few large silos that much better?

As I'll be discussing in one of my talks at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin this week, OpenSocial is a great step forward, but as Tim says it doesn't go nearly far enough. I want APIs powered by OpenID and OAuth that let me control what services see which of my friends. I want to be able to interact with my friends all over the web; I want distributed applications (Dopplr, LiveJournal, Twitter, etc) to have controlled access to my friends from the mammoth social networks.

Yesterday at BarCamp Berlin, Lukas Rosenstock, Christian Scholz, and I hosted a session on the social graph and OpenSocial. It was a very full room (~60 people) where we mainly led a discussion around OpenSocial. We started out by giving background on why opening the social graph is becoming so important (ala our Web 2.0 Summit presentation) and then Christian presented on OpenSocial itself.

By the end of the hour session, we had generated a list of questions about OpenSocial which we all were able to answer to varying degrees. I volunteered to blog these questions as the entire group in the hope that Google and others will answer them. If nothing else, I'll track down Patrick Chanezon when he speaks about OpenSocial at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin in a few days.

All the questions asked:

• What is Google's role in OpenSocial? Is OpenSocial actually open, or does the community need to build "OpenOpenSocial"?


• What does it take to make my site OpenSocial friendly? How do things like Microformats and FOAF relate?


• How can I support OpenSocial APIs (e.g. get friends) without allowing the applications to be run directly on my site?


• How does or will OpenSocial address social network portability?


• How will OpenSocial application management evolve. Will it really be "write once, run everywhere" or will different containers impose policies that cause an application to still need container specific programming. For example, container A gives 5mb of data storage whereas container B only gives 100kb.


• How will OpenSocial impact spam and abuse? Will it become more prevalent in a distributed fashion?


• How does data storage work? Can an application share data between containers?


• How does OpenSocial address internationalization issues?


• What Google products is OpenSocial going to create? Why did they do it beyond just disrupting Facebook?


• How does OpenSocial work with mobile?


• What business model changes will adoption of OpenSocial lead to?