November 3rd, 2007
OpenSocial unleashed into the wild
Now that OpenSocial has been partially release into the wild, the effects on the ecosystem are being felt. TechCrunch reported on a hack of an application on Plaxo’s OpenSocial-compliant host. Plaxo shut down the application. Plaxo’s chief platform architect told Mike Arrington the OpenSocial platform is a work in progress and a few kinks need to get ironed out.
It’s early in the life of OpenSocial. The APIs are not yet stabilized and developers are just starting to test out the code in the Orkut sandbox. Plaxo jumped the gun with public access to an OpenSocial widget (Emote) on its service.
For enterprises, such as Oracle and saleseforce.com who jumped on board in support of OpenSocial on day one, the road to implementing the APIs will be longer than the consumer social networking services, given more sensitivity to security and identity management issues. But there should be no doubt that next year, OpenSocial will have significant impact and at least bring thousands of applications across the divide.
See also: Marc Canter on OpenSocial compatibility–social networks and applications vendors working together
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
