OpenSocial is huge. Here's why.
Facebook represents the ultimate extension of the vanity pages and website communities that originally emerged in the 1990's. Epitomized by Geocities, the early website communities (we didn't call them 'social networks' back then), gave individuals the tools and website hosting to simply put up their own website. I founded an early ecommerce community, spree.com, in 1996, so am quite familiar with the players. After an initial multi-year surge in popularity (and market value) the original social networks became neglected and lost the luster they had during the Internet bubble. Then myspace appeared. And friendster. And facebook. As their various fortunes waxed and waned (up to now mostly waxed), one feature stayed constant. They were all 'destinations.' You 'went to' myspace to check up on your friends. Facebook took this to the logical extreme, becoming a 'platform.'
When I launched this blog last summer, it was because I saw this as the END of the evolutionary path started by geocities more than a decade ago. Despite its rousing success, I see facebook as a dinosaur of social networking: highly evolved out of the original community form, but sharing most of the same DNA. Like the dinosaurs it will likely last a long time, but if it doesn't evolve into a more distributed form, it will become extinct when we get a planetary impact. In this case the impact won't be a comet, but distributed social networking.
OpenSocial is one piece of distributed social networking. It will allow sharing of profiles and other information across social networks. It opens the various destination social networks by creating a common standard for sharing information. It lets information be 'distributed' across multiple destinations.
It won't surprise me to see facebook adopt OpenSocial. Ultimately that will be demanded of them by their users. It will take a bit of time for OpenSocial to get wide traction, but I posit that by this time next year facebook will be a participant.
