Google’s announce­ment about their OpenSo­cial plat­form got a huge amount of play among the Twit­terati today. I had a brief but inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion with Brian Bres­lin of Infin­i­me­dia and Twit­bin about OpenSocial.

Brian: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/open-social-scr.html

Me: yeah I saw that.

Brian: btw I have a the­ory on OpenSo­cial: the most valu­able piece of info is the graph in this case its the evo­lu­tion of hyper­links.
v1 was links between doc­u­ments.
v2 was let­ting users cre­ate those doc­u­ments.
V3 is the link between peo­ple.
So all these sites will be run­ning these wid­gets in mini silos of sorts with plenty of win­dows for peo­ple to look in but their data is likely to be con­tained. OpenSo­cial pro­vides a com­mon markup lan­guage and struc­ture sort of like xhtml or micro­for­mats. Even­tu­ally peo­ple will start com­mu­ni­cat­ing between silos and google will be there to facil­i­tate and index and mon­e­tize that link so they will be build­ing their social graph data. A meta social graph. Since they are likely to be look­ing in the silos (indi­vid­ual sites), and the con­veyor belts trans­fer­ring data between them.

Me: Right. A hyper­link is a hyper­link, be it between doc­u­ments or between peo­ple. For exam­ple, when one blog­ger links to another, is this a link between doc­u­ments or between peo­ple? What is see is that peo­ple are “dress­ing them­selves up” online, just like in real life. Just like you would put a watch on, here you can put a wid­get that shows your iLike music pref­er­ences and what you’re telling oth­ers is: music is impor­tant to me, here is what I like, and if you like it too, then let’s talk. This is the premise of social objects.

Brian: right but you’re talk­ing about a gran­u­lar level, and I agree w/you on what social object is, etc.  But I’m talk­ing about the plat­form provider level.

Me: so when you say the link between peo­ple is impor­tant, you imply Google will tar­get ads based on the infor­ma­tion gleaned from these rela­tion­ships and user profiles.

Brian: yeah, since they will surely get into the graph some­how, on what you like and what your friends like and your activ­i­ties and the con­text of the page you are read­ing. Imag­ine you’re read­ing a CNN arti­cle about auto safety and the ads show “get new tires for your Toy­ota” instead of some­thing more con­tex­tual like “auto safety spe­cial­ists” since they will know you’ve got a Toy­ota and your brows­ing history.

Me: ok, but they can already do that with­out OpenSo­cial. But I see what you mean, they can get demo­graphic data from your friends’ user pro­files. Loca­tion too.

Brian: ulti­mately it depends on how deep the soc­nets let google look.

Me: I was think­ing how on the one hand you have mem­bers on your site adding their OpenSo­cial appli­ca­tions and at the same time, your site is an OpenSo­cial appli­ca­tion some­where else. And the right strat­egy now is to make your­self an FB app and an OpenSo­cial app and enable users to add OpenSo­cial apps on your own site.

Brian: Well the way we’re build­ing our apps is so that they are easy to repub­lish to dif­fer­ent plat­forms, so once the specs are out for OpenSo­cial, we’ll have a set of mod­ules that let us recom­pile for dif­fer­ent stan­dards  since myspace is likely to have their own. But face­book could also open up fbml and bam, OpenSo­cial is dead in the water.

Me: why would OpenSo­cial be dead in the water? I think it would coexist.

Brian: well what would you build for, some­thing with one way to pub­lish to Facebook’s 50Million + the mem­bers of whome­ever adopt it or OpenSo­cial which would sup­port Orkut, Linkedin, and hi5 [and MySpace]. If you are tar­get­ting US users, facebook’s trounces them by far, but they are likely to coex­ist. I was kind of exag­ger­at­ing on dead in the water. It’s going to be tough technology-wise for soc­nets to decide which to adopt, and how to fuel their own growth. Since they won’t be able to com­pete on fea­tures since any social­net­work could instantly add 1000 fea­tures via the devel­oper com­mu­nity. But ulti­mately by being late to the party, hi5, etc couldn’t make their own platform.

Me: you’re right, it heav­ily depends on who you’re try­ing to reach and these will prob­a­bly coex­ist. I’ve been talk­ing about “why my social media is not your social media” and OpenSo­cial takes it a step further.

Tech­no­rati Tags: open social, openso­cial, google, face­book, orkut, hi5, social net­work porta­bil­ity, snp

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