How Open is OpenSocial?

Google's recently announced OpenSocial API most importantly is an attempt to get some of the attention that facebook attracted through its facebook API. the idea is simply to more or less mirror the facebook API's functionality in a way which is standardized across social networks. that's good, because developers for social networking apps can now more easily develop them across platforms, and the list of initial supporters of OpenSocial is impressive (Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING).

facebook's approach is brilliant, because the facebook apps pull more data and people into facebook, without letting anything out. so in addition to being a walled garden, it also is a walled garden with many people doing free gardening work for facebook. in an attempt to look better than facebook, OpenSocial talks a lot about being open, but it really is important to understand what they mean by being open.

openness of the API in case of OpenSocial means that the API is open and freely available, so that it can be supported and used by social networks and developers of social network apps. the data management, however, is managed in exactly the same walled garden approach as on facebook. so don't expect to be able to develop new exciting social network apps which somehow combine data from different networks.

from the social network companies' point of view, this approach of course is the only acceptable solution, because the whole social networking wave is about collecting people and information about them, and maybe selling that information directly or indirectly, but definitely not giving it away for free. so while OpenSocial is an interesting development, it is not so much about openness, and also is not the enabling platform that would be created if social networks were providing open RESTful APIs.