I took a quick look this morning at the Google Code Blog and was simply amazed by all the applications coming out. Google’s new open source, social networking protocol, OpenSocial is really taking off. With the amount of sites supporting this protocol (Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING) I think OpenSocial will easily become the developers platform of choice. Granted, Facebook does have the lead right now. But, OpenSocial is the Firefox of social apps; transparent, transferable, and highly adaptable. Meanwhile, Facebook social apps are available to only people, who, well, only use Facebook.
Writing apps that only work on Facebook may sound like a good idea now, but I need only have a friend I haven’t kept in touch with for a while send me a message on Friendster to be reminded how temporary website stickiness actually is. None of these social networks are very unique. None of them have reinvented the way we communicate online. If anything, social networking will be the trend that invented bacn: the endless stream of notifications (”you have a message”, “you have a new friend request”) that clog your email.
But I digress, I’m amazed by all the new OpenSocial projects that have just been released and I thought I would list some that looked really promising:
TimesShare (the NYT is doing a great job coming up with innovative apps)
Additionally, there are a lot of fun new Picasa Apps, too.
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