I use my Facebook page to stay in touch with hundreds of people every day and during the course of those days I post a lot of interesting content that is not available for search by all the usual suspects - Yahoo! Google etc. Not to mention that our Nemo Design Facebook Group can’t be searched either. All because Facebook is a hold out in endorsing the OpenSocial initiative.
Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.’s MySpace.com announced in March that they have formed the OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit group to support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year to promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites. Google has focused efforts on creating code, such as the open source OpenSocial APIs and the Social Graph API, to make social data more portable and accessible to applications. Just in case you were worried that all those heavy hitters might have too much control OpenSocial is now managed by an independent organization.
OpenSocial is basically a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called “hosts”) that choose to participate.

“As the largest contributor to the memecached system, Facebook has long been a leader and supporter of open source initiatives but will not join the foundation,” a statement from the company read. “The company will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities that will benefit the 300,000 Facebook Platform developers while improving the Facebook user experience.”

So Yahoo! and Google’s search engines are shut out which is a drag.

Tags: Facebook, OpenSocial

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Editorial, Nemo Design, Opinion, Social Change, Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.