OpenSocial makes the web better
Posted by Joe Kraus, Director of
Product Management
As the web goes, so goes Google, and that's why we care about
making the web better. Five months ago,
id="d4zo" >we launched Google
Gears to make the web better by making it work offline. Now, we
want to make the web better by making it more social.
A tremendous amount of activity is occurring on social networks
these days. Hundreds of millions of people share photos, rate
movies, and throw virtual sheep at one another. All these social
networks are looking to give their communities more and more things
to do — and they realize they can't do it on their own. They
need to open up and become platforms for developers to extend. So,
many social networks have looked at, or launched, their own APIs
that typically do the same kinds of things: give access to user
profiles and friend networks, and allow an application to post
activities so that everyone's circle of friends knows what the
others are doing. All of this has been good news, because
developers could get their applications onto a social
network.
But there's a problem: it wasn't one or two social networks
doing this, but ten or fifteen. Now, to get on all the social
networks a developer has had to customize their application for
each one. When your "development team" is just one or two
people, the proliferation of APIs forces you to make tough choices,
because you can't do that much one-off work. Not only is this
situation bad for developers, it's bad for consumers too: When
developers can't afford to do the work to make their
applications work on a certain social network, the people using
those networks lose out.
That's why today we're excited to introduce
of common APIs that make it easy to create and host social
applications on the web. OpenSocial allows developers to write an
application once that will run anywhere that supports the
OpenSocial APIs.
It's good for developers because it makes it easier for them to href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=orkut&continue=http://www.orkut.com/RedirLogin.aspx?msg=0&page=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.orkut.com%2F&hl=en-US&rm=false&passive=true"
focus on making their web apps better; they get lots of
distribution with a lot less work. It's good for websites,
because they can tap into the creativity of the largest possible
developer community (and no longer have to compete with one another
for developer attention). And finally, it's good for users,
because they get more applications in more places. Global members
of the OpenSocial community include
>MySpace,
>Engage.com,
>Friendster,
id="tibr" >hi5,
id="uhyg" >LinkedIn,
id="lh01" >Ning,
id="l_r5" >orkut,
id="yw13" >Salesforce.com,
id="igv." >Tianji,
and
id="odbv" >XING.
We were thrilled to see
partners turn out for our very first CampFire One event, a
small gathering of developers at the Googleplex. They do the best
job of explaining why they support this vision of an open,
programmable web. And so in the spirit of being social, we want to
share the video from tonight's event.
Tags: , Director, Joe, Kraus, ManagementAs, Posted, product, Web