Tomorrow Google will be announcing a new social networking initiative called OpenSocial, which will provide a common, free platform for social networking sites to open up their data to third-party application developers. Social Networks which adopt the standard will be able to share information about user profiles, friends, and activities with other sites in a standardized way, which should greatly facilitate the transfer of information about the social graph between services. In addition to their own Orkut site, Google has partnered with Ning, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, and others, all of which will be supporting OpenSocial.
The rapid uptake of the Facebook Platform since its May launch has left little doubt about the value of allowing third parties to build functionality on top of existing social networks. Their are currently over 7,000 Facebook apps deployed, and these apps are getting about 32 million hits per day. This frenzied activity has been one of the primary drivers of the company's stratospheric $15 billion valuation. Yet, all of this value creation remains locked within Facebook's "walled garden". OpenSocial is a significant step towards breaking down the walls between the currently-siloed social networks, and so threatens to take considerable wind out of Facebook's sails.
Marc Andreessen, founder of Ning (not to mention Netscape), has an excellent overview of the new standard. TechCrunch has their own overview, as well as a preview gallery of applications built using OpenSocial.
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