Nov 5, 2007

Google’s OpenSocial is exciting. I talk a lot about “integration of applications” being the future of software; OpenSocial is proving my point.

OpenSocial is a set of common API’s which will allow developers to write applications that leverage a number of different functions from participating web sites…

Good usage of an API can be seen at FORECLOSEDmaps.com. FORECLOSEDmaps.com uses Yahoo Maps… the way we’re able to use Yahoo Maps is by utilizing the Yahoo Maps API. If we decided to switch to Google Maps, we would have to register with a different vendor and re-write all of the code… Long story short… its a pain to use multiple API’s

OpenSocial will allow developers to quickly leverage mutliple sites using 1 API!!!

There are a ton of articles about it and everyone is really excited but the API isn’t publicly available yet… I can’t wait… I’m going to make something cool… I don’t know what… but something cool.

My Predictions

1. As I stated (and its been proven) with the facebook platform, there are going to be a lot of new applications developed.
2. The first (not necessarily the best) applications developed will see a flurry of users and will quickly go from thousands-of-users to hundreds-of-thousands.
3. Acquisitions of the most popular applications
4. You will see many new integration applications… that is… applications that allow you access to many of your favorite web sites from a central location (Facebook, myspace, linkedin… all from one location)
5. People will become more transparent and data will become more seamless. Now that developers can easily marry your information across different platforms you will be able to connect a linkedin profile with a facebook profile.