Google to Push Widgets with OpenSocial

By Geoff Duncan October 31, 2007

Internet titan Google getting ready to enter the social networking business—not with Orkut, an early social networking effort now dominated by Brazilians, but with OpenSocial, a new distribution platform designed to distribute online applications (a.k.a. widgets) to a broad range of social networking sites. Instead of running its own social networking site, Google wants to be the back-end that pushes applications and widgets to those sites, with the promise that if developers built their applications for OpenSocial, it’ll work across all supported sites. And Google isn’t planning to make money on OpenSocial right away—but, of course, everyone eventually expects it to be lashed to Google’s enormous online advertising efforts. Reports have Google lifting the veil on OpenSocial Thursday, November 1.

At its core, OpenSocial is a set of application interfaces that developers can use to create applications that work on any supported social network. Initial OpenSocial partners will include LinkedIn, Friendster, hi5.com, and Ning—although the two titans of the social networking space (MySpace and FaceBook) aren’t yet on board. However, successful Facebook widget developers Slide, iLike, and RockYou are reportedly on board with OpenSocial development.

Rather than relying on its own markup language (a la Facebook) OpenSocial centers on common-use APIs (managing user profiles, linked friends, and activities) and relies on developers to build the applications using standard HTML, Javascript, and Flash.

Since Facebook opened its platform five months ago, widgets have become one of the hottest development areas in social networking, with Facebook’s directory currently sporting more than 8,000 applications. Since then, social networking sites MySpace and Friendster have announced plans to open their platforms to application development.

[Update Nov 1: Google has formally announced OpenSocial, with the surprise that social networking giant MySpace is on board as a partner for the common API set.]

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Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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