This guest post is written by Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate for OpenSocial at Google. Over the last 20 years he has alternated between giant companies and founding startups – BBC, The UK MultiMedia Corporation, Apple QuickTime, Technorati and now Google. He is one of the driving forces behind microformats.org and advisor to the Open Rights Group. He wants you to remember that URLs are people too, and his URL is http://epeus.blogspot.com.
In this Q&A-style post, Kevin delves into the standards that make up the emerging open social stack (OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, and OpenSocial), looking at the infrastructure problems they address, and exploring some of the live implementations, including Plaxo and Google Friend Connect.
Q: We keep hearing that “Google wants to make the web more social.” What does that mean?
Everything on the web is more interesting when it takes place with friends. Today’s social networking sites, are the online contexts where you and your friends go to be social, and the time we spend on them shows the attraction.
