OpenSocial gained a new convert today. AOL is officially joining the initiative to standardize social-networking apps, Google VP of Engineering David Glazer announced today at the Google I/O event. TechCrunch’s Mark Hendrickson liveblogged the entire session, which just ended. From his notes:
AOL joins OpenSocial today. Their suite of products will support the standard.
Not much more was mentioned. AOL, of course, bought Bebo for $850 million, which is already part of OpenSocial. But Bebo is also integrated with the Facebook platform.
So is AOL just hedging its bets in the social network wars? Looks like it. With Facebook planning to open-source its platform, it will be interesting to see if AOL shows up as a partner for fbOpen as well.
Update: A post on the official OpenSocial Blog states that AOL’s first steps will be to implement Gadgets on myAOL.com. The post says that Gadgets should help developers create widgets that can be used on myAOL, as well as the web at large.
Congratulations to OpenSocial
AOL has no idea what they’re doing in the web 2.0 space. That announcement sounds to me someone at AOL that has something to say woke up this morning and rolled a dice.
You should talk about bootstrapped startups not big companies that have all setup up, where are the 22 year old tech startups?
OpenSocial – why don’t you make out a styled logo/badge, like those of OpenID or RSS or RDF etc, so that the OpenSocial fans can promote it??
That 3d-pagelet thing is just too big too ugly…
The users (developers) will win this battle. I don’t care how many big, old companies you get to join hands.
What the developers want is to be able to code revolutionary applications in a server side code they feel most comfortable with.
We are living in a truly life changing era. We are starting to see people using the internet as a mainstay for their social interactions. We need powerful, robust, social applications that run on more than just high level scripting and a framework based on “gadgets”.
What this does for AOL is less important than what standards do for the industry and the consumer. As large scale software becomes more and more of a bureaucratic mess, standards is the most effective way to help consumers and developers of software to survive. AOL is a recognizable name to many. That said, wouldn’t it be great if companies joined standards for the purpose of making life better for the user. You know, like Google
Another great post. And again, I’m offerimg “Live Coverage” of these conferences at my blog: http://www.lionblog.uni.cc/
i’m still waiting for opensocial to be meaningful to me on some level
zuck ain’t losing much sleep here
Netlog joined OpenSocial too, fyi