OpenSocial has been... extensively covered in just about all media over the past few days. The official site is up, and the video from the Campfire 1 announcement as well.
Obviously this is just a first step. We're all trying to build a self-sustaining ecosystem, and right now we're bootstrapping. It's a bit like terraforming: We just launched the equivalent of space ships carrying algae :).
A key next step is making it easy to create social app containers. It's not hard to build a web page that can contain Gadgets, though it could be easier. Adding the social APIs, the personal data stores, social identity, and authentication and authorization makes things a lot more complex. This is the part I'm working on, along with a lot of other people. It's a problem space I've been working in for a while on the side. Now it's time to achieve 'rough consensus and running code.'
Obviously this is just a first step. We're all trying to build a self-sustaining ecosystem, and right now we're bootstrapping. It's a bit like terraforming: We just launched the equivalent of space ships carrying algae :).
A key next step is making it easy to create social app containers. It's not hard to build a web page that can contain Gadgets, though it could be easier. Adding the social APIs, the personal data stores, social identity, and authentication and authorization makes things a lot more complex. This is the part I'm working on, along with a lot of other people. It's a problem space I've been working in for a while on the side. Now it's time to achieve 'rough consensus and running code.'
You know, I never thought this would happen. I've seen discussion about the Facebook walled garden, but I thought to have a social software equivalent which is like internet email as opposed to old-fashioned closed email systems just wouldn't fly. I thought that if Facebook added a thingy to their site which did a certain social software function, then everyone involved in the open standards would have to run around working out how to implement the thingy in the standards. But maybe although there are a rich number of things you can do (poke people, send gifts, write on walls etc.) the underlying functions, and most things that haven't been thought of yet, can be described in an API. Interesting times, in the good sense.
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