• http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

After a long build-up, Google has finally released OpenSocial. Unfortunately, it seems that the name is a bit misleading. Many people, myself included, had assumed OpenSocial would provide a way of communicating between the various social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

These social networking sites have always been exceptions to the general rule of openness in web 2.0 sites. You cannot, for example, create an rss feed that shows all of your friends in Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace along with their recent updates. However, it would be quite easy to compile this same feed using accounts of your friends on LiveJournal and Blogger.

OpenSocial doesn't address this problem; rather, it's targeted at developers of widgets for these sites (Facebook not included). Now, if you're a developer that creates a MySpace widget that displays the location of all of your friends on GoogleMaps, that same widget will also work on Bebo.

That's nice, but it is not what I needed. Interoperability between the sites would allow us harvest the social aspect of these sites in our various educational endeavors. For my part, I was hoping to provide links between our language exchange site The Mixxer and other social networking sites. For example, I do a search for native German speakers who would like to practice English. Along with the information they provided to my site, I could also see if they were in MySpace or StudiVZ, view their profiles there, and see if we already had some common friends.

For now it seems the only way to break down the barriers between the sites is on the client side. The recent release of Flock includes a sidebar that shows your contacts from the various major networking sites along with most actions. But it's still missing a universal search function across the sites for people, and an "add contact" function for each network. Let's hope someone can add these functions to Flock and/or Firefox with the new hooks available via the OpenSocial api.