OpenSocial to Help With Cross Application Permissions?
Hopefully with Google’s OpenSocial API launching Thursday, I’ll finally be able to tell Flickr, “Just let anyone that is my friend on Facebook, or in my GMail address book, to view my photos.”
I’m tired of telling people, “Sure, you can view my photos. Just create an account at Yahoo, then login to Flickr, then let me know your username.” I already know these people somehow, and that relationship is somewhere on the web (probably in my address book) so why can’t I tell Flickr to use that?
The idea of a portable set of relationships which enable cross site permissions is really, really important to the scalability of the web. Our data is spread out, it’s in a web. Let’s use it on the web!
October 31st, 2007 at 4:25 pm
I don’t think we’ll get what you are looking for right away, but maybe at some point. First, social networks need to implement the OpenSocial API. Then, once they do that they need to become consumers of that same API from other providers. And even after all that happens the big players need to be convinced that there is value in them implementing the API rather than just consuming it from other small social networks. What is the value for a large player to implement that API?
October 31st, 2007 at 8:35 pm
No doubt this will take some time. I would imagine that a large player would gain value by implementing the API by further allowing the “network effect” to take effect. That is, the more this data can enhance my experiences across the web, the more incentive I have to enhance that data. That players will compete by how they let me enhance (add on, slice, dice, derive meaning from) all that data.
November 8th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Maybe you’ll get a button row like “Share this article on digg, stumbleupon, reddit”.
“Add me as a friend on myspace, orkut, jaiku, facebook, …”.