Open Social – The Next Big Leap Forward?
2007 October 31
Marc Andreessen certainly thinks so. How can you fight a name like that? It is an API for building social networking containers and applications. From Marc’s Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web
In a nutshell, Open Social is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:
- “Containers” — social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and…
- “Apps” — applications that want to be embedded within containers — for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.
That is cool. It can expand the platform for social networking applications, sparked by Facebook’s API. While reading Marc’s blog, I also noticed that Ning has over 100,000 social networks (not applications, but actually networks). That is amazing.
The next few months will be very very interesting since the industry pundits all agree that it is a great idea.
Wow Dorai. This is amazing. Thanks a ton for sharing this. It actually helps by giving another dimension to the entire thought process.
Cheers
Vaibhav
Yes Vaibhav. This is one of the big impact items. Under ideal circumstances, Facebook and MySpace should join the party.
Also imagine some of the possibilities.
Let us say you can develop containers and Facebook stuff (like FQL, FBML) are not proprietory.
People may build a FB container using Open Social
This may allow people to move their FB apps right away.
Exactly Dorai.. this is an assault from Google on Facebook.. i m in the process of writing a basic post on this.
To be frank.. i just cant wait for OpenSocial now
Cheers
Vaibhav
Cool. I look forward to reading it. Let us see what happens during launch.
its here
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/
Thanks Bala.
By the way, cool blog.
The Unofficial OpenSocial Alliance Directory. It is a wiki. So if you are not there, add yourself.
http://wiki.mashupcamp.com/index.php/TheOpenSocialAlliance