Open Social – The Next Big Leap Forward?

Marc Andreessen certainly thinks so. How can you fight a name like that? It is an API for building social networking containers and applications. From Marc’s Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web

In a nutshell, Open Social is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:

  • “Containers” — social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and…
  • “Apps” — applications that want to be embedded within containers — for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.

That is cool. It can expand the platform for social networking applications, sparked by Facebook’s API. While reading Marc’s blog, I also noticed that Ning has over 100,000 social networks (not applications, but actually networks). That is amazing.

The next few months will be very very interesting since the industry pundits all agree that it is a great idea.

Open Social Web

Google Open Social: The Third Place

Google to Out Open Facebook

Google Transforms into… from Dare

8 thoughts on “Open Social – The Next Big Leap Forward?

  1. Also imagine some of the possibilities.

    Let us say you can develop containers and Facebook stuff (like FQL, FBML) are not proprietory.
    People may build a FB container using Open Social
    This may allow people to move their FB apps right away.

Comments are closed.