OpenIDFiguring out OpenSocial
So it’s out, and lots of people are talking about it, but I’m still trying to work out exactly what it is. There seem to be two parts to it: a standardised set of GData APIs for accessing lists of friends and their activities (like the Facebook news feed) and a bunch of JavaScript APIs for enabling developers to write hostable widgets and “container sites” to embed those widgets.
Unfortunately the official documentation confuses things horribly by referring to Google Gadgets in various places. From that my guess is that the embedding part consists of externally hosted code running in an iframe, along with the clever fragment hack to mediate controlled communication between the container site and the embedded widget (and bypass the same-domain restriction). Not sure how that would defend against a malicious widget that uses frame-busting to send the user to a completely new page though—Facebook rewrite and sanitise all of the CSS and JavaScript that they serve, but I seriously doubt Google’s open source container API pack will include that level of sophistication.
My other question at the moment is how much OpenSocial relates to the larger goal of an open social network, where import and export APIs allow people to easily move from network to network and still find their friends. I don’t see anything in the GData People API that explicitly addresses the need to correlate the same user’s account across multiple sites (it looks like it doesn’t include an e-mail address for example) which seems to me to be pretty essential.
Am I getting this right, or have I missed something important? I’d love to hear from people who have been properly briefed on all of this.
...and is the video a parody or am I being too European?
Harry Fuecks - 2nd November 2007 14:51 - #
I think it hurts the goal of an open web. I'm going to make a video on my thoughts about it today.
After reading through the documentation, I am really disappointed with this. Especially since Brad Fitz was behind this.
I'm not positive that Brad was involved in this - I haven't seen his name attached to any of the coverage, aside from my assumption from the other day.
Seems like a hastily-constructed vendor sports spec, made for business reasons ("I'm going to fucking kill facebook!" -larry page) rather than any particular market necessity.
This too shall pass.
Michal Migurski - 2nd November 2007 17:27 - #
OpenSocial looks like a solution for social application migration.
Don't know if it hurts the goal of an open web like Erik says, but it does not offer anything for social network migration either.
It'd be good to see more sites opening up data about your social network so that you can migrate it. The question is - how many of them will do that?
UldisBojars - 2nd November 2007 19:05 - #
Here's the video:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=V3ghQXUvrtk
Simon, I can't seem to direct mesage u on twitter.
"I think it hurts the goal of an open web. I'm going to make a video on my thoughts about it today."
the irony of that statement...
Anyways,
The acts, no matter how benevolent or righteous, of a single player, no matter how well intentioned *cough*, towards seeking to define a standard for use by an open community is intrinsically oxymoronic. When that player is a large, closed, almost rival community... well, now that's just folly.
Boris Anthony - 2nd November 2007 21:23 - #
I had some of the same thoughts today while tinkering with OpenSocial and reading the docs - glad to hear others have the same outlook. I really think this has been oversold and is more Google-centric than people may have thought.
Joey Tyson - 2nd November 2007 21:57 - #
It's a small subset of FB platform API, and a subset that might as well be standardized anyway. I don't see it as a threat to FB -- FB could adopt it, or even "open up" their more powerful APIs and let other implement them.
The devil is in the details here. I cannot tell how the industry will cope with the situation where a service "embraces" the spec, and then "extends" the schema with custom data to provide "extra services" atop the base profile. It seems there is incredibly strong business temptation for the top players to do this.
Joshua Allen [msft] - 2nd November 2007 23:58 - #
I'm afraid it has little to do with open or interoperable social networks...
The goal of the Facebook platform was/is to import functionality to make facebook more "sticky" and to lock people further in...
OpenSocial mirrors that goal for social networks supporting it: they want to be able to offer their users "the long tail of applications" created and hosted elsewhere... to keep them inside.
Applications can roam freely, users can't.
Yeah, I'm the same, I thought it was going to be about the data you own and the ability to transfer/copy it to another social network. In fact, I wrote about the fact that I was slightly dismayed yesterday
Today, I've been thinking that it's still a good step, just not in the same direction were wanted it to be in. I feel that OAuth seems to be the one I'm more interested in now.
I am at the Barcamp Berlin 2 right now and of course Open Social was a great topic. I also had the pleasure to do a session together with David Recordon and others on this topic (but forgot to ask about Brad, might do tomorrow).
I did a little introduction and you can find my slides on this blog post:
http://dev.comlounge.net/uncategorized/open-social -at-barcamp-berlin-2/
I also recorded the following Q&A session which featured questions like:
- what is Google's benefit of doing it?
- will it only help developers or users as well?
- Is this helping with handling a my social graph?
As David is from Six Apart he sort of was the closest one to Google in this room but of course he also didn't know all the details.
As for the open social network question I think Open Social does not really help here. It really seems to be more for developers to make their lifes easier. It was also unclear how you actually access data from e.g. Flixter of you are on a Ning site (probably via OAuth as the Google group hints, about David also talked, btw).
As for the Google Gadget references it's simple: It builds on top of Google Gadgets (look at the slides or the tutorial). You just add some Javascript and a config line to your Gadget and that's it.
One idea we discussed was this: What if some OpenSocial app would simply export the users friends to a more central service? It probably could work but will probably be against the TOS of that service.
So all in all there are still a lot of questions. I also would like to implement some container for Plone but I guess we still have to wait a bit for documentation on this (which again hints that this is sort of quickly thrown out as it's still missing).
We might agree though while it is not the solution to be a open social network it might be a (little) step in the right direction.
I will also put up the video of the question round later.
Christian Scholz - 3rd November 2007 23:23 - #
I didn't like Harry's video.
Proflogistics - 4th December 2007 08:58 - #