• O'Reilly Radar, Friday, November 9, 2007 11 AM

Tech guru Tim O'Reilly loses his respect for Google's so-called OpenSocial initiative following a conversation with Patrick Chanezon, the project's developer advocate for the program. Incidentally, "open" is a misnomer, he says, because the API does not allow for data exchange between social networks. In other words, when you download an app for MySpace, you'd have to download it all over again at Bebo, and reenter the data. The applications do not communicate. You might ask: what, then, is the point of OpenSocial?

Indeed. As such, "it provides little incremental value to the user," O'Reilly says--which means it provides little incremental value to anyone. "We don't want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks." After all, data mobility (think: mashups, RSS) is one of the key components to the whole Web 2.0 movement.

It would be far more useful if developers could create programs that let people manage and export friends' lists across different social networks, but perhaps that's the very thing OpenSocial's members don't want--they want to hold onto their traffic, after all. Ironic for an "OpenSocial" network, no?

As O'Reilly says: "Set the data free! Allow social data mashups. That's what will be the trump card in building the winning social networking platform." Amen.

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