iosart blog

Surely, you’ve heard about Google’s new OpenSocial platform.

I believe this is indeed a very significant step forward, especially taking into account the launch partners who are already on board.

Naturally, a lot of comparisons between OpenSocial and Facebook Platform have been made, mostly having to do with the fact that Facebook Platform is closed and proprietary, and OpenSocial is open and standards based. While I couldn’t agree more, after reading the OpenSocial documentation carefully, I couldn’t help but notice that there’re several Facebook Platform features missing from OpenSocial – mainly having to do with app management, permissions etc. To try and make some sense of the differences, I created the following table, comparing the two platforms side by side.

Conclusions – first, OpenSocial is only at its 0.5 version, and I’m sure it will be significantly improved and extended in the near future. With that said, looking at the features side-by-side today, it’s clear that OpenSocial currently provides two basic functionalities – containment and access to container data. It doesn’t provide any of the higher level functionality present on Facebook – things like application directory, application permissions and privacy settings, spam controls, additional application links and hooks, ‘app addded’ news posts etc. Each container site will need to implement most if not all these functionalities independently, as they obviously address pretty common needs and problems. This also means that within each container there will be slightly (or maybe even significantly) different app virality, discovery and distribution dynamics.

One thing is for sure – OpenSocial makes developers’ life much much easier. Unlike Facebook platform, OpenSocial doesn’t require learning new markup and query languages, and the specific platform quirks associated with many of the proprietary mechanisms. Also, with OpenSocial developers won’t have to work hard to figure out how to easily push updates to user profiles, or how to include dynamic images or initially interactive flash elements into the profile box. On the other hand, many of these restrictions were introduced by Facebook for a good reasons (at least in their opinion), and it would be really interesting to see how removing these restrictions will affect end-users’ experience.

I’m personally really looking forward to seeing what effect OpenSocial will have on the Web and how Google’s recent move will affect Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and other big players, and what will be their response. Exciting times!

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 at 8:19 am and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.