If you’re not familiar with OpenSocial, it’s a protocol lead by Google to allow widgets and applications to be portable to any social network or website that part of the alliance. If you’re not familiar read “Explaining OpenSocial to your Executives” to get started, I explain it in pure business terms.
I’m conducting research right now for an upcoming report on OpenSocial, I’ve already interviewed David Glazer and Kevin Marks from Google, and have interviewed Joseph Smarr from Plaxo, Nick O’Neill from All Facebook, and will be talking to David Recordon from Six Apart next week.
I just asked my twitter network, (and received about 20 responses) about which white label social networks are open social compliant, and received quite a few responses. I frequently use social media tools for research ‘discovery’ to quickly find out a multitude of answers, but of course, it’s no substitute for analysis. I’d guess that I use social media tools for 10-20% of all my research, asking, reading, linking, or leaving comments.
The reason why I limit this list for 2008, as I’m pretty sure it will be most of the industry that adopts this standard
‘White Label’ (you can rebrand them) social networks that have adopted or agreed to offer the OpenSocial Protocol
KickApps (read more)
Ning (OpenSocial Directory)
Flux (read more)
So why is this significant?
Soon, corporate websites with social networks will start to host popular applications for other websites, this makes the web distributed. Soon, corporate websites will stop being irrelevant. Development time will be reduced, applications can quickly be rehashed and other opportunities that I’ve found will be in the report.
I expect this list to get quite a bit longer by the end of this year, if you know of others, please leave a comment.
Comments are closed.