The conference call is about to start. Let’s see what they have to say beyond the original announcement earlier today of Opensocial.org. Here are my notes:
Wade Chambers from Yahoo kicks things off. Yahoo has been impressed by OpenSocial so far. Feels OpenSocial is rapidly developing and has a lot of potential [obviously not there yet, though].
Joe Kraus, director of product development at Google: Explains what OpenSocial is—write once, deploy anywhere. Two major container partners have launched (orkut and MySpace), with Hi5 coming online soon. Today OpenSocial reaches 200 million users. “If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far, go together.” OpenSocial is about going far.
Our collective goal was to make sure that OpenSocial is on a strong footing for years to come. Announcing today intent to creating a non-profit organization. It will provide a safe harbor for intellectual property. Expect the foundation to be set up in next 90 days. Yahoo, MySpace, Google have agreed to patent non-assertion covenant. Once the foundation is created, it will get similar non-assertion clauses from all OpenSocial contributors. Google will contribute OpenSocial trademark and other documentation, specifications, etc.
Steve Pearman, SVP of product strategy, MySpace: Quite a lot has happened since launch with MySpace as a container. What does OpenSocial mean to containers? ["containers is OS-lingo for hosting sites like MySpace, Bebo, etc]. It means specialization. Real winners will be the users when everyone can specialize on what they do best.
Q&A:
Miguel Helft, NYT: To what extent is creation of foundation a response to concerns that Google would own the IP created by OpenSocial?
Wade: From the Yahoo perspective, while Google has been doing a great job shepherding the community, it is a community effort. This is the next step.
Joe Kraus: this is just the next step in where OpenSocial needs to be heading because it is a community-driven process. More a natural evolution than a particular response.
Me (TechCrunch): Why weren’t other OS partners involved in this announcement and if there is ever any revenue associated with the foundation, how will that be split up?
Joe: the idea was to invite the whole community to form this foundation. In the meantime, until that is set up you have seen MySpace, Google and Yahoo enter into an agreement give [protection to the community], the intent is involve the whole community
The Opensocial specification doesn’t say anything about monetization. Each of the different social networks implementing OpenSocial can spit up revenues in any way it sees fit. The foundation will not be taking in any revenue because that is not in the specifications.
Steve, MySpace: In the event there would be some revenue lines to the foundation, I don’t know what they would be, maybe T-shirts, they would go towards furthering the purpose of the foundation, not something that would b split among constituents.
Eric Eldon (VentureBeat): Some stats on who OS is doing?
Joe: Since specification 0.5, we made two major revisions, with 0.7 everyone felt it was launch ready. two major containers have launched with OS , MySpace and Orkut, Hi5 coming next Tuesday.
Steve: thousands of developers, hundreds of application in last two weeks.
Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb: Are there concerns about OpenSocial splintering? [Uh, yeah].
Steve: Early feedback from app developers is that once they got OpenSocial running on one OS social network it took only hours to make it work on another. We think we are off to a great start. [Non-response, see above]
Wade: We are supporting OS because we feel it will benefit the Internet, users, and developers. [Double non-response]
[I agree with Marshall that splintering is the big issue here. Everyone pays lip service to OpenSocial, but if they are big enough they go ahead and try to create their own platform or team up with Facebook. See imeem and Bebo. Anyone else think this is a problem?]
im days away from launching my opensocial app and I cant wait. Hopefully this will be even bigger for me than my facebook one was
Delighted and everybody impressed.
At least they have moved in the right direction with the patents on this. I might look at using it now.
Can someone show me an example of how OpenSocial has benefited me, the common social network user?
I love the quotation “If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far, go together.” Feel like I wanna print it beautifully and hang it in my office
Is there a reason why my question during the Q&A period was omitted from the liveblog?
@Jeff the Great: OpenSocial lowers the barrier to entry for application developers. So you may not directly see the benefit, but OpenSocial makes it much easier for developers to create an app and get it added to just about any OpenSocial participant’s site. Easier app development and distribution = more and better applications.
I think an eventual evolution of OpenSocial may also be data portability, but don’t quote me on that. The idea there is that you can move your pictures, your blog posts, etc., from one social network to another using OpenSocial and its data exchange standards. I’m not sure if that was a separate movement, though.
Splintering is an obvious problem, but another looking for a solution is accurate analytics.
Right now we (mediapops.com) leverage google analytics with our Open Social apps, but the data set is somewhat limited.
One example of this is in the Myspace model, there are 3 “view” types: my home page, profile page and canvas (the only view you can place ads on) so developers trying understand the usage of their apps to deliver better experiences and create revenue streams will need a new metrics model.
@7 David C
Good points, thanks for the insight. However, if the user doesn’t benefit, what is the point? I hope to start seeing some benefit soon.
I had heard that LinkedIn and Plaxo were part of this but haven’t seen any ‘widgets’ I can start using on either of those sites.
Am I missing something?
Looks like it is going to be big.
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Michael B. – Piss off.
@7 – more true if the language barrier is also addressable. Likely will be.
Yawn – each of them has got their own reason to be there that will in the end undermine the whole project. Yahoo! wants to do it to defend against Microsoft; MySpace to defend against FaceBook. Google sees it as a way to open up a market that it has so far been unable to crack.
My guess is that we’ll see the occasional press releases and responses, but nothing that will really change anything.
OpenSocial is destined to flop just like OpenDoc and Java Applets did, can Google even remember back that far?! Lamerz, study your 1990s history!!!
The “write-once run-anywhere” fantasy ties up resources and restricts agility. The hindrances far outweigh the benefits and we’ll forget OpenSocial like we forgot Applets.
Running with wet sneakers down the shore doesn’t work, take off your shoes and go baby go!