Wow -- this sounds promising.
Open Social, spear headed by Google, basically is an open API that enables developers to build containers and applications that can easily integrate with web sites. Similar to how any developer can create and deploy an application for use on Facebook, only there's one big difference...
...it's
open for use on any web site. It's not only for proprietary use on a single website. A no walled gardens concept.
Per
Marc Anderson's blog post:
"If you have a web site today, and you want to turn your web site into an Open Social app, that's perhaps even easier than "porting" a Facebook app. Just take your current HTML and Javascript front-end pages and create a version of those pages that use the Open Social API."
The launch is this Thursday, but it sounds like there's some baking to set in:
"The API has to stabilize a bit, and containers have to finish testing and validating their implementations. But public production systems aren't far off -- Ning, for one, will go live as soon as we possibly can, probably just as soon as Google finalizes the API."
Although there is no perfection in this world, folks seem hopeful with a "wait and see" attitude and lots of questions -- this one being a big one:
Dave Winer: "When Google makes their announcement on Thursday, the question they should be asked by everyone is -- How much of my data are you letting me control today? That's pretty much all that matters to anyone, imho."
