Arno Manders

Google OpenSocial

Is Google launching a new competitor for Facebook or is it something completely new? And OpenSocial, what is that?

google code

Well it is definitely not a competitor for Facebook. Google is not opening a new community website where you can share things with your friends. OpenSocial more a set of tools (API’s) for developers to create applications that will work on a lot of community websites.

opensocial_developers_communitysite

So on one side you have the developers that create tools and on the other side you have the community websites and OpenSocial is in between to provide the developers of a set of API’s that can be used on a lot of community websites.

OpenSocial is providing 3 different sets of API’s

  • Profile information (user data)
  • Friends information (social graph)
  • Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

On the client side OpenSocial is using a JavaScript API and the server-side is using RESTful data APIs. This is very technical and and if you are interested to find more information about this please go to the own website of Google’s OpenSocial.

In the next long video they explain the concept of OpenSocial

Posted

in

, ,

by

Arno Manders

Tags:

Comments

2 responses to “Google OpenSocial”

  1. Lykle de Vries Avatar
    Lykle de Vries

    “Concurrent”? surely you mean “competitor”! But I think it is more like a new framework, of infrastructure that will help programmers AND users to more easily re-use their identity and content online.

    What is your own opinion on Open Social?

    Reply
  2. admin Avatar
    admin

    Thanks for correcting me.

    I think it’s more a API convention. Google puts it like this” if you keep this rules to your website we guarantee you that your site get more social tools and your site has advantage that other populair sites also participate”

    the benefit for the users is that they don’t have to login for every action they do on the different websites that participate in openSocial. In the youtube movie is a nice example, there they have a “pimp my car” website and there they add a song to a playlist on another website.

    On big question that I have… Why is Google doing this? Do they earn something with this?

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Lykle de Vries Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *