Yahoo to adopt Google OpenSocial?

According to this ZDNet blog, Yahoo may be poised to adopt Google's OpenSocial API soon. If this happens, it would mean that essentially every important player in the social-networking / online application space had adopted OS, with the exception of Facebook. This would, of course, put a little additional pressure on Facebook to adopt OpenSocial as well, or risk losing developer mind-share to what would be a defacto industry standard.

And so what is the relevance of this to OpenQabal? In short, the possibility of OpenSocial becoming the industry standard for plugging social applications into a container means it's that much more likely that we will also adopt OpenSocial as our strategy (or at least a strategy) for dealing with this same issue.

With a (more or less) open standard out there, widely adopted by oodles of developers and platforms, it just makes sense to support it. Now this would probably matter more to somebody who was interested in putting an OQ based site on the public internet and running a general purpose social-networking site, than to somebody looking at OQ for enterprise use. And the enterprise really is more what OQ is aimed at, at least in the short-term. But even there, as more actual useful applications emerge (as opposed to the "vampire slayer" and "rate my hot friends" type apps) even enterprise users will want the ability to plug this stuff into their platform.

There is one thing that we should hope for however... Google really needs to take the Google Gadgets specs / api and the OpenSocial specs / api and submit this stuff to a recognized international standards body for adoption. No matter how much you trust Google now, it is really always better to work with standards that are controlled by a neutral (well, more or less neutral) standards body than by one vendor.

Syndicated 2008-03-13 08:29:04 from openqabal