Don’t we all remember that Friday when OpenSocial was announced. People sat and watched the hour-long campfire 1 video, held meetings, made calls, sought further input… When the smoke cleared it was certain that this is going to be big and important - some day…

The business practice of engaging with a small set of partners and announcing an alliance is a legitimate one. However, an alliance is not a consortium, and it has little to do with standards and with being open. In fact, a standard is agreement among competitors.

For OpenSocial to be open, it should be open with “write permissions” not “read only”. Back in the day when I was still a speech-processing research guy at IBM labs I participated in IETF and W3C standardization activities. What I’ve experienced is companies opening up their internal APIs or technology, and then having to go through revisions of it for their competition before a widely accepted (and then hopefully adopted) outcome is finally reached.

We all love Google, and for good reasons. They changed great and fundamental things about the web, and they introduced a new standard of web ethics and practices - Google is king. OpenSocial is clearly a significant and important development towards a more open web, but the way the OpenSocial move was carried out is not in line with Google’s do good spirit.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 7:29 pm and is filed under Stuff, Thoughts. 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.