Prying Open the Social Graph - GigaOM :

I'm seeing an amazing number of articles that are criticising Google Friends Connect for not being about data portability and locking your data into Google.

So. Look at this in the context of Google promoting OpenSocial instead of in the context of Google opening up and providing data portability. OpenSocial is now 4 things.
1) An API for building widgets
2) An API for building a container for widgets for big web sites
3) A REST API for accessing the underlying data and mashing it up
4) A Javascript wrapper to a hosted container on Google for dropping onto small websites

Look at it like that and Friends Connect looks like an entry level container that widens the market for widgets by vastly increasing the number of places your widgets will run. They've managed to hide all the complexity of building a container or installing and integrating ShinDig into one line of javascript. Isn't that an amazingly clever thing that will have at least as much effect as wrapping Google Maps into a snippet of javascript that anyone can use?


[ << XRDS Service Types ] [ The Social Network Wars Begin In Earnest: Facebook Bans Google Friend Connect >> ]
[ 14-May-08 4:10pm ] [ ]