Why Support OpenSocial?

I’ve been keeping an eye on OpenSocial since it’s initial annoucement with some interest but also a healthy dose of skepticism. I’m still wondering why anyone would want to support open social. It doesn’t give you any integration between systems – all it provides is potential access to the OpenSocial widgets that 3rd party developers make.

Now, if we look at the 3rd party widgets from FaceBook you’d be doing your users a great favor by not supporting OpenSocial. I’m yet to find any FaceBook “application” (I use the term with great disdain) that doesn’t do whatever it takes to sign up new users, usability and user experience be damned.

However, if OpenSocial gets support outside social networks it has the possibility of attracting developers who actually care about their users, not just their advertising profits and install count. If that happens, then it may be an advantage to have access to those applications. I suspect a new business model that’s not advertising based needs to be discovered first though.

It’s with great interest that I see the proposal Brian McCallister sent through to Apache for an open source implementation of OpenSocial called Shindig. If it gets adopted into Apache Roller and Apache JSPWiki (incubating) it could move OpenSocial out of the eyeball obsessed social network scene and into the collaboration market where productivity enhancing applications might start appearing.