OpenSocial, Facebook, Microsoft vie for developers

OpenSocial is growing up fast. What started out as Google's effort to create a common application programming interface, focused on developing small applications that can tap into multiple social-networking services, is becoming a fully fledged development platform.

According to the OpenSocial Foundation, the project has garnered a potential audience of 600 million users. Some 7,500 compliant applications have been developed so far, and 20 containers (hosts for social applications) supporting the APIs have been created within the past 12 months.

The Google spin-off incorporated itself as a not-for-profit foundation to ensure support from a broad range of social-networking competitors, including Yahoo, MySpace, Hi5, LinkedIn, Ning and Xiaonei, China's largest social network.

Giants Facebook and Microsoft, however, have so far failed to jump on the OpenSocial bandwagon. Facebook has 125 million active users around the world, but its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is seeking to establish Facebook as an 'open' application platform and, so far, is holding off on endorsing OpenSocial. Facebook investor Microsoft, which last week introduced a social dimension to its Windows Live platform, is in the middle of introducing a cloud services development platform.

The large OpenSocial contingent, plus Facebook and Microsoft, are all advocates of open web standards, but they are in competition for developers.

"Everyone doing social stuff is interoperable at some level of the stack," said David Glazer, director of engineering at Google. "Facebook and Microsoft are using a big chunk of the open stack. Open architectures are all converging. It's moving fast — last year, there was no such thing as a social platform."

Glazer pointed to collaborative efforts on OpenID, OAuth, and Portable Contacts as examples of open web standards that are in various stages of adoption. But the OpenSocial notion of "write once, run anywhere" doesn't fly without Facebook and Microsoft joining in, or the three major platforms providing a level of interoperability and compatibility beyond common web standards.

OpenSocial is also being positioned as more than a platform for basic widgets (gadgets, in Google parlance). "We are going to see application-to-application hooks, which will blur the difference between things in the box (container), and lots of different surfaces working together," Glazer said. "We will definitely see enterprise applications."

There might come a day when Microsoft Office or Google Docs and Spreadsheets are among the top OpenSocial applications, said Alan Hurff, senior vice president of engineering at MySpace and president of the board of OpenSocial. However, enterprises more slowly adopt new technologies, such as social networks and mashups, and must have a return-on-investment justification to fund deployments.

Some of the future improvements to the OpenSocial platform will include better development tools (such as a Visual Studio-like tool to speed development), payment platforms, analytics, cross-container portability and mobile-application support. "We need to make it easier for developers to build applications, reach users and make money. From where we started, the platform has gone a long way in the right direction," Glazer said.

In regards to the OpenSocial code, version 0.9 is due out at the beginning of next year. Glazer was asked to speculate on when version 1.0 would be released. "The functionality of 0.9 feels 1.0-worthy. But we don't want to stretch beyond what we know," he said.

OpenSocial is still an infant, but it has big ambitions to stretch out as a major application development platform for the cloud.