Google announces OpenSocial API
Are you a Facebook member? Did you join MySpace for some of your friends don’t have Facebook accounts? There’s a solution, and it’s called OpenSocial.
OpenSocial is an API for social networks. There’s nothing new about APIs, but the Google is taking a flying leap by standardizing the different APIs of different social networks into one API. You might ask: “Why Google?” Actually Google is just developing the OpenSocial API, but it’s not an idea Google had on their own - they have a couple of influential partners in the social web business: hi5, MySpace, Ning, Facebook and Xing, just to name a few.
I can already hear some people moan about Google doing it - but in this case the fear-mongering that Google will soon know everything about us doesn’t seem quite eligible. To quote one of the social networking companies’ CEOs that was giving a demo of an OpenSocial app at the Google Campfire One: “This is Flixter working directly with MySpace. [...] Google doesn’t control the data in any way” (Joe Greenstein, CEO of Flixter, approx. 55:00 on Campfire One: Introducing OpenSocial on YouTube)
I can’t wait to see what developers are going to do with OpenSocial - would be nice, if Google got everyone together using OpenSocial.
[via Kaffeeringe]