OpenSocial Challenges Facebook’s Platform

Big social networking news as Google makes good on rumors and launches OpenSocial with a live URL yesterday.

So far, the big draw is OpenSocial's rumored simplicity and inherent openness. Whereas Facebook keeps its data behind closed doors and requires developers to use its own markup language, OpenSocial is poised to challenge aspects of walled garden proprietary services by allowing developers to work with a simple set of tools consisting of HTML, javascript, and elements of Flash. Here's how it comes together:

According to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch:

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Hosts (Hi5, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Orkut, Ning, Salesforce, Friendster, Viadeo, and Oracle - did I mention MySpace!) agree to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs.

Unlike Facebook, OpenSocial does not have its own markup language (Facebook requires use of FBML for security reasons, but it also makes code unusable outside of Facebook). Instead, developers use normal javascript and html (and can embed Flash elements). The benefit of the Google approach is that developers can use much of their existing front end code and simply tailor it slightly for OpenSocial, so creating applications is even easier than on Facebook. 

The goal - streamlining the app development process across multiple networks for maximum reach with major synergy.  Open, open, open!