Welcome to the Open Social
I’m stepping in front of the bus again. After the posting on how I’m not overly impressed with Google Android and the Open Handset Alliance, I’m similarly not impressed with the Open Social. It has nothing to do with the hacks that are starting to happen already, this is a fixable problem. And I’m not opposed to it, I think it’s a good idea, but I think people seem to want to give these movements that Google is trying to start a lot more importance than they are worth.
The important thing to realize is that at best applications are now commoditized, so sites won’t be able to distinguish themselves by 3rd party apps. This is the best hope of Open Social - at worst if it doesn’t take off, you have the same situation you have now. So, why would this be a Facebook killer? Every app developer is going to build their apps on Facebook first, that’s where the users are and it has a well developed system to try to virally spread these apps as more people use them. So at best, the majority of developers build Facebook and then Open Social versions. This does not help other sites - the point of a social network is to be large and Facebook has that - everyone’s there already and it has the momentum. I suspect that it will not even approach a 1:1 ratio, Facebook apps will always outnumber Open Social ones, giving Facebook the edge. Remember that people weren’t migrating in droves to Facebook because of the apps, that’s a new thing, they were migrating because it was a better experience than what was out there at the time.
Here’s the other odd thing. I find myself strangely in complete agreement with Tim O’Reilly on this. He notes in this piece that Open Social, like Facebook’s API doesn’t let you pull data out of the systems. It is a closed Open Social, not very welcoming. What the world needs is some way to help unify all these social networks - help people maintain their identities across them, not just port widgets to them. Tim gets it absolutely right when he says this:
But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don’t want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.
Open Social isn’t the mashup api of the social networking world, it’s the java virtual machine promising write once/run anywhere. Of course we all know how well that worked (oh, if you don’t know how well that worked, it didn’t as all the different java virtual machines weren’t really that compatible with each other - minor differences adding up). You know how html and css are supposed to be standards and the same for everyone? Yeah, that doesn’t really work out too well either as soon as you get into any level of complexity, ask any html/css coder out there and what there’s 4 players in that field?
Sure it is nice that there’s an api standard. People will be able to write apps for lots of sites now - in theory. But how well will that work out? All sites are able to build extensions to the API so, I suspect even if this gets wide traction the most popular sites will all have their proprietary hooks and app developers will code to those making them incompatible with smaller sites.
I do quite like that they made the whole thing in javascript - it’s nice to retain all of that coding prowess. Still I wonder if making all the apps client side is limiting or problematic given all the browser differences (and, potentially, site api implementation differences). I futher wonder if you lose some functionality and/or security by keeping server side interaction through a REST interface. I have yet to investigate either API in any depth so it’s all idle speculation. One day I’ll have more time.
I don’t know, maybe I’m just going through a I don’t love google phase and I’ll snap out of it soon. Everyone seems to think this is the bomb. It’s not that I don’t think it’s interesting or a worthwhile goal, I am simply skeptical that it will be the world changing, Facebook killing device that people make it out to be. Small networks will continue to be small and big networks will continue to be big. If all your friends aren’t there it doesn’t matter how many apps are on a platform, you’re not staying. If the apps are the same across networks, then it’s the exact same situation, you’ll go where your friends are - the presence of these apps is irrelevant since they’ll be everywhere. With API’s as a prerequisite for getting big in a Facebook world, I can see this as important but it’s effects at best will be felt a long time from now - long enough, I think, that who knows whether social networks as they are envisioned now will even be remotely the same and whether API’s of this sort will matter.
