It looks like OpenSocial in its current form is just an app runtime to compete with the Facebook Application ecosystem. We just had a very very crowded session on Barcamp Berlin about OpenSocial with (among others) David Recordon from SixApart where we tried to create some clarification about OpenSocial and ask a lot more questions.

Big questions raised from this session include the following:

1. What does this do for the portability of social networks?
2. How are containers supposed to manage their applications?
3. What is the importance of microformats in this context?
4. How can you make your site friendly to interact with OpenSocial applications?
5. What is Google’s role in control in all of this?
6. Is this spammer’s heaven?
7. Where’s the data stored at?

There was also a lot of talk about privacy which seems to be more important to Europeans than it is to Americans and seeing as we are importing a lot of these services from the USA, we are also importing the same policies embedded in the code.

The question about what Google wants to make searchable, I think is easily answered by first people and secondly with a social graph, Google can provide users with a lot more accurately ranked search results.

Picture by bjoern

And I wondered whether you could write an OpenSocial app that retrieves your list of friends from the social network and POSTs them out to your own repository of social graph information. This way you can write a social network synch’ing tool which will extract your various social clouds from each service and provide you with added value on top of that.
The only thing you would need to do after that would be to align the various graphs by marking people in different networks as being identical.

David replied that some containers might not allow such use of their data, but the data is not theirs to begin with. My profile and friends information is mine, and social networks that do not respect that basic principle will lose me as their customer.

(And about our app, we’ve got a design and API keys, but the WiFi on the venue is proxied, so developing is a bit difficult here.)

Everybody has been completely swept away by the news of Google’s OpenSocial network launching really soon now. This is the stuff we have been eagerly awaiting.

Anyway the API is supposed to launch tonight, so we’ve got a drive to Berlin to digest the stuff and we —we have four pretty good developers in the same car— will try to make one really bomb application or presentation or both during Barcamp Berlin.

I have also contacted Yme Bosma, the guy responsible for the implementation of these APIs by the Netherlands’ leading social network: Hyves for access to their implementation.

We can make some nice stuff with this and I can’t wait.

I have recently started developing with Django again and the experience has been quite rewarding so far except for some minor points which could be improved and would —I think— massively increase adoption.

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