The official announcement came out today that several social networks are teaming up with Google for an open development platform. This is in answer to the cries of developers as they feared writing new apps for each development platform.
Called “Open Social”, this is a direct answer to the Facebook development platform that has caused a stir with it’s thousands of silly apps that have begun to clog people’s profiles. It is thought that Open Source will be a bit more serious due to some of the partners involved. Sites that have signed on include Engage.com, Friendster, Google, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. Essentially this is a way for everyone to share the same platform and not everyone having to invent their own wheel that won’t be compatible with everyone else.
So, how does this effect your life in the social networking world? Well, it can mean two things. First, you could just ignore it, or, you could see if there is some way you could leverage what your company does in to an application of your own. Mind you, it should be useful and not something silly, but you now could kill several birds with one very small stone. If you develop your app with Open Social, you then could have people on multiple networks all using it, and all of them promoting your company with very little work on your part.
As for what the app could be depends on what your company does, so it’s hard to give general ideas, but this is certainly something that anyone with an eye on social marketing needs to keep close tabs on for the foreseeable future.
This will be great, because as someone who is a member of Facebook, I’ve noticed it’s becoming increasingly cluttered with “silly apps” as you noted. Everytime I log on, there’s another notification to apply. It really does get annoying, yet on the other hand, addicting.