A lot of discussions about social networks and Google open social (as usual with people who did not have a clue what they are talking about) have been going on the last couple of days. It took me a while to digest myself, but here is some content that might help.
In general, social networking services, such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, allow users to create a profile for themselves. Users can upload a picture of themselves and can often be “friends” with other users. In most social networking services, both users must confirm that they are friends before they are linked. For example, if Alice lists Bob as a friend, then Bob would have to approve Alice’s friend request before they are listed as friends. Some social networking sites have a “favorites” feature that does not need approval from the other user. Social networks usually have privacy controls that allows the user to choose who can view their profile or contact them, etc. (Wikipedia)
Today new networks are being created every day, often leveraging existing technology or white labeled offerings but still each in their own way.
And here comes the problem: when you want to be represented in multiple networks because not all of your friends are in the same site or because you have several interests mapped in different verticals. E.g. you use LinkedIn for professional reasons and have a profile on Facebook to keep in touch with contact from college and a login to MySpace because this is where you find your music. It will be a pain to maintain all of these partly definitely redundant data one by one. This is where Google comes into play and considers leveraging that pain for their own objectives (targeted advertising).
Open Social takes the Facebook platform concept and provides an open standard approach that can be used by the entire web. Open Social is an open way for everyone to do what Facebook has done including Facebook itself, potentially. … Open Social’s API is based entirely on Javascript. If you know HTML and Javascript today, you will be able to immediately use Open Social to turn your web applications and web sites into Open Social apps. You can also use standard web development tools to build Open Social apps. This is obviously a much better way to operate than having to learn a proprietary marketup language or query language. (Marc Andreessen)
So the idea is that you still build or use your own social network but then by adding open social you ensure that it becomes compatible to other networks that also incorporate it. Google open social is the glue to connecting networks. Of course in addition Google will benefit from it by having their hands on the data and the full context…
Probably the best summary is by Joanne Colan from Rocketboom (thank you Hugo for pointing me out to it).
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(I may need to lengthen this response into a blog post of my own)
What I haven’t yet seen is any explanation of how Open Social solves the problem you’ve identified above.
What I get from reading the Open Social API and viewing the announced demos is that an application / widget built using the Open Social API can be used on any compliant container.
So, I can make a LOLCat widget, and then allow people to use that widget on Ning, Hi5, Orkut, and any other Open Social compliant container.
However, each of those instances remains a separate network of people – my identity on Ning is not linked to my identity on Orkut – I have the same widget available now in each network, but the networks themselves remain separate.
In other words, I see Open Social making live much easier for widget makers – which will allow each competing social network to offer more widgets to its users – but I don’t see how this answers the proliferating network problem – doesn’t it actually make it worse?