November 7, 2007

OpenSocial and OpenHandset - open for business!


Within the first seven days of November, we've seen two ground-breaking announcements that are going to dramatically change the way we interact over the internet: OpenSocial and Open Handset Alliance (OHA).

For those of us who belong to more than one social network, OpenSocial will allow us to conveniently manage one profile across multiple sites (finally!). So far the following social sites have signed up: Bebo, Engage, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

By pioneering these two open platforms, Google has provided a massive distribution channel for developers to launch and monetise new applications, be they accessed via your PC or mobile phone. Popular apps that have joined include ilike, flixster, rockyou and slide.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and social networking has fostered an explosion of information ripe for the picking and monetization. Google naturally is not going to miss out on this one. The official site for OpenSocial APIs is here and have launched Campfire presentations to promote the use and understanding of these new platforms. The first one contains demos of most of the above partners and can be enjoyed below (don't worry, it's not all technical geek speak).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

the "open" ideas from google are good, but i think google are facing a uphill battle to promote these two open architectures.

esp the OHA. without Nokia, Sony Ericsson and some other big names, would the newly announced "GPhone OS" be a big hit?