There’s a new buzzword on the street, and it’s being shouted by some pretty loud voices, like Google and Myspace, for instance. The word is OpenSocial, and it’s got the entire development community in near-scramble mode. It’s also left a lot of business decision makers scratching their heads, trying to figure out what it’s all about.

So, Trav… what is it all about?

Well let’s first talk about what it is not. This is not Google’s attempt to create yet another social network. Whew. One less profile I have to create.

OpenSocial is a collaboratively developed set of APIs that will be adopted by a variety of sites among the social graph. In a perfect world, it will allow developers the ability to write a single application that can be dropped into various sites.

But… I’m an advertiser, not a developer. Why should I care?

Let’s say you are a forward thinking brand advertiser, and you want to allow social media users to interact with your brand in an innovative way on the social media network or aggregation site of their choice. You and your creative folks come up with this really wicked “widget” — totally interactive, inherently shareable and so amazingly compelling that everyone will want to use it.

In order to get maximum coverage, you’ll have develop an application that will run in the Facebook environment, another that runs in the MySpace environment, another that plugs into Second Life, one that drops easily into WordPress blogs, one that does the same for Movable Type… you see where this is going? Each of those services have their environment, so the application needs to be modified (slightly or less so) for each destination. The same things happens between Mac and Windows software — same application (mostly), but buy the wrong one from the store and you have a nice and shiny coaster for your desk, but no install.

And… your point?

Your development costs shink. Your adoption rate skyrockets. Your branded widget gets more exposure. And I think you can figure out the rest.

So… now what?

The good news is that lots of sites have announced support for OpenSocial, including developers. We’re fully behind this effort and look forward to how this will open up the social graph to more and more folks looking to explore innovative ways to reach a highly targeted and motivated group of people. Let’s talk!

And if you’d like more information, here’s the best in-depth, low-level technical explanation of OpenSocial I’ve seen so far.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Thoughts and Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.