Google's OpenSocial

The hot news of these days is Google's response to the Facebook API - OpenSocial.  I had breakfast with a Facebook employee today, and he was already asking me if I would see any value in developing using OpenSocial.  The competition is hot.  So many people are writing about it, and it's hard to find a useful summary because there's not much information available yet, but here is a rundown of what I consider significant about OpenSocial:

• It's really open: The API would allow writing applications for Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, and Friendster (oh, and Oracle - yes that made me wonder too).  TechCrunch has a gallery of some screen shots of certain applications.
  
• The application has access to shared data right on Google's servers - so you're riding on Google's scalability.
• There is no special markup language (FBML in the case of Facebook).  It's based on JS and HTML.
• It provides programmable access to the three key elements of the social networks:  Profile, Friends, and Activities.  Facebook provides sufficient APIs for profile and friends information, but access to activities is vague.
  
• Applications seem to have more flexibility in terms of using the canvas, or the their screen area.  Facebook enforces some serious limitations there.

But there are issues too.  The biggest source of the issues, like any other type of "aggregation" or "common interface" in the world of software, is the differences of these "hosts" (i.e., social networking sites).  It's interesting to watch how the APIs will handle different data elements and different layouts of information hierarchy among these sites.  Obviously Google wants to keep OpenSocial high level to make it work with all of these hosts - we have to see how much granularity will be lost in the process.  If I as a developer end up making host-specific API calls 50% of the time because the high level, common APIs do not give me the data I need, this project has failed.

Another related but outstanding issue is that the nature of these sites is not the same.  LinkedIn is highly business oriented, Friendster is friends and their birthdays.  Yes they both have a social graph, but that's where the similarities start to fade.  The usage pattern is different and hence the activity stream.

Last but not least, there's the issue of placing ads within the applications...  Google cannot be neutral there.  Ads are the "business" of Google, and at the same time most of social sites live on displaying ads.  There's going to be some serious conflict of interest between what the application shows, what the social network shows - after all, they already have contracts, and where Google plays a role in what's displayed where.

Hmmm...  And I cannot resist.  Does anybody bet over whether Facebook will adopt OpenSocial at some point or not?