Google just created a lot of buzz around their new OpenSocial API.
Many sites, one API
Common APIs mean you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.
 |
From a corporate perspective, facilitating social networking is a way to get customers to gleefully organize ourselves in nice marketing targets. They are F*&%ing doing it again. Social network silos. The only context in which the windsurfers will ever meet the Cabbage Patch Doll Collectors is if they both happen to want to buy the same product or service.
In the Google description of the OpenSocial API's quoted above, the audience is anyone who wants to build an application to get people to do something within their affinity group. Do you listen to music I like. Do you support the cause I support. Are you going to the event I'm going to. It is a good thing to collect people of like mind. To build consensus or aggregate opinion. However, on these platforms, before any workflow or make-a-friend engine is built, the potential to connect to people that hate the things we love is the same as the potential to find the choir to whom we love to sing.
Not sure what I am winging about...
It is getting easier and easier to find people that are just like pieces of ourselves. It is no easier to discover that we are wrong, on misinformed, or uninformed, or racist, or apathetic, or less tired than we had thought, or more effective than we had imagined.
We need to leverage the fact that the same mesh of physical wires and radio waves that connects, connects all of us.
Comments