Friday, March 14, 2008

OpenSocial is live and on MySpace

We've been hearing about OpenSocial for months -- Google announced development not long after Facebook rolled out its Facebook Apps, turning it from a mere social network into an application platform. OpenSocial aims to do something similar, but truly open, so web applications across the Internet could share information with each other. One of the first big names to sign on was MySpace, the largest social network.

Yesterday, MySpace quietly added the first batch of apps based on OpenSocial. I added a couple of them for fun, but they are really not much to look at -- very simple, similar to the first Facebook apps. Perhaps they'll get more complicated, and we'll see more full-featured utilities such as Facebook's MyOffice app? Perhaps not: one developer says that OpenSocial is still mostly vaporware, without the sophisticated guts to handle rich social graph interaction and messaging.

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