Why Is Everyone Agog about Google’s OpenSocial ?

Last week Microsoft invested in Facebook. This week, Google unveiled the first details about its OpenSocial API platform. This move hit the news big time. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch broke the news. The New York Times ran Miguel Helft's and Brad Stone's story yesterday, and the Times' Saul Hansell blogged about it today. The blogosphere has been in a state of buzzaphoria for the past few days,  and Google's stock has soared again.

What Is OpenSocial? Instead of competing directly with other social networking providers, Google is spearheading an initiative to create a cross-social network set of APIs. As Stowe Boyd explains in his blog post, Google OpenSocial: The Open Common Services Approach, there are three key APIs:

• Profile Information (user data)

• Friends Information (social graph)

• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

The way I read the preliminary information, the profile API enables you to request and send information about people; the Friends API enables you to request and offer connections and social graphs; The Activities APIs let you request and send information about activities (events, dates, locations, files, updates). Here's the link for the actual Google API (soon to be made live): OpenSocial API 

Instead of being platform-specific (working only with LinkedIn or Facebook, for example), the idea is to create a set of high-level standard calls that will work across social network platforms. Developers could then write applications to these “meta-APIs” and know that their applications can plug and play with dozens of social networking platforms.

Google’s initial partners in this venture include:

• Social Network Platform Hosts: LinkedIn, Plaxo, Friendster, hi5, Ning, Orkut (owned by Google)
• Enterprise Software Application Ecosystems: Oracle, Salesforce.com
• Application Developers: iLike, Flixster, Slide, RockYou, etc.

There has been much speculation about whether Facebook or MySpace will join in. Both have their own large developer communities and their own APIs. Facebook is now in the Microsoft camp, so their explicit participation is unlikely. Google has an advertising partnership with MySpace, so time will tell. However, most of the developers that are being recruited to vet and adopt the APIs are the folks who have created much of the value add on Facebook, so they’ll probably want to ensure that there’s not a lot of effort involved to reuse code they’ve written for Facebook out onto the rest of the social network noosphere.

The Good and Bad News about Google OpenSocial

The good news is that:

1. OpenSocial is a great concept and a great name. It’s here to stay.
2. Google isn’t trying to compete with its Orkut platform against Facebook and MySpace, but rather is offering an olive branch of social network interoperability to all players.
3. Google tends to gain a lot of buzz for anything it does, so the ranks of the social networking parade will continue to swell.
4. The chances are good that Google’s meta-APIs WILL be useful and gain traction, because it’s Google, because a number of smart, influential folks (like Marc Andreesen) have jumped on board, and because these are META-APIs, e.g., designed to work at a higher level of abstraction than writing to a specific application or platform. XML helps a lot.

The bad news is that:

1. This is really just another Google vs. Microsoft play. My ecosystem is bigger than your ecosystem.
2. Many of these vendor-sponsored meta-API efforts never gain real traction.
3. Despite the hype and excitement, this may be, like Googlebase, something that sounds great but doesn’t spawn innovation.
4. “Top Down” politically-motivated APIs never really take off. Bottoms up, customer-evolved APIs and services are the way things usually happen.

How Do Google APIs Gain Traction?

If you think about the single most successful APIs that Google has offered, e.g., Google Maps and Google Earth, it’s important to realize that these weren’t offered up as part of a grand plan to make Google Maps a ubiquitous tool. When Google Maps were launched, Google had no open APIs. They took pains to camouflage the interfaces. Yet crafty developers examined the URLs, discovered the Lat/Long coordinates and reverse engineered the APIs and began to create mashups on Google maps. That’s when Google realized that publishing APIs was the right thing to do. The rest is history.

So, coming up with a top down/industry consortium approach to API standardization may not be the way this actually plays out. Instead, we may see an organic evolution based on natural selection of the best of the best services and APIs that spring up over time. Good services that turn up in Facebook are highly likely to be replicated or reused on other platforms. If there’s an easy way to make replication faster by writing at a higher level of abstraction with open, human-readable XML-based APIs, developers will head in that direction. Most of these services are monetized by advertising or “per use” or commissions related to helping people get things done.

What Does Google’s OpenSocial Mean for Businesses?

Most of our clients are struggling to add social networking capabilities to their online communities. We all want to make it easy for customers and prospects to find one another, to share expertise, to blog, comment, share opinions, invite others to “join their network,” and plan events or let others know about events. Social networks work because they mirror the way that people naturally connect. “Oh, you need help with that? I know so and so who could help you out.” We’re pushing our online community suppliers to give us more social networking capabilities, like social graphs (who knows whom?), customer profiles (what do you want which other people to know about you and in what contexts?), and activities (events, calendars, maps, supporting content). We also need ratings and reviews.

Having a set of standard services’ APIs that would allow us to plug in and use the most business customer-friendly social networking applications and services would no doubt accelerate business’ abilities to add social networking features to their Web sites.

Customer Networks and Content Is Taking Over Companies’ Web Sites

We’ve written before about the “Case of the Disappearing Home Page.” One of the corollaries to that trend is the fact that a larger and larger proportion of our Web sites are now comprised of user-generated content. Giving customers the tools they need to do their jobs, and to find the resources and expertise they need to get things done, should be the first order of business for any customer-focused Web property (or Internet-enabled product). Helping customers create their own evolving social networks around their jobs and goals is a great way to empower customers, as well as a great way to grow your business organically.

More selfishly, most businesses are intrigued by the sales and marketing potential of social networks. Headhunters are the biggest users of Plaxo and LinkedIn. People will pay big bucks to update their CRM systems with the more up-to-date customer-maintained profiles that reside on these social networks. If you want a good run down of some of the implications for business, I recommend the blog post, Ubiquitous Social Networks for Business  by Bob Warfield.

From the business customers standpoint, I think there’s an interesting and growing tension between our desire not to have to re-enter the same profile data and passwords at hundreds of different sites and our concern about “big brother” in the guise of ANY unifying service (Google, Microsoft, or open anything) to stitch the bits of our activities together and spy on us. It would be nice to be able to link the interested parties in my business network with my African rural development network, or my family and friends with my in-laws’ family and friends, or my sailing buddies with my hiking buddies, even if these folks “hang out” on different networking platforms. On the other hand, there’s a brand/identity issue. I AM my network of choice. Kids like one environment; Baby boomers prefer another. The two don’t mix well. However, we do sometimes want to coordinate and link up.

The bottom line: whoever is plotting your company’s customer community architectural strategy should be keeping a close eye on the evolving standards in social networks.