The “Break it Down” Blog

John Hering sent in news that Google is prepping it’s launch of OpenSocial Thursday.

The interesting think here is that OpenSocial isn’t another social networking service, but instead is a common set of APIs used to develop software against any social networking site participating in the OpenSocial community.

Think of this like OpenID, but instead of identification across participating sites, it’s full on development APIs for entire social networking platforms like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.

At launch the OpenSocial partners will look like this:

• Hosts (Social networks participating/using the API)
  • Orkut
  • Salesforce
  • LinkedIn
  • Ning
  • Hi5
  • Plaxo
  • Friendster
  • Viadeo
  • Oracle (Hu?)
• Developers
  • Flixster
  • iLike
  • RockYou
  • Slide

As far as developer access to the APIs, the hosts will set the access rules, as far as who can call/use the APIs for their service.

The interesting thing here is figuring out what Google’s role in this process is. As an aggregator of all data, it’s strange to see Google step into the middleware/framework development arena like this. It’s not like they are hosting the host APIs on their servers and have access to those call/replies, the individual hosts will do that.

Unless in true Google fashion, Google is actually solving it’s own biggest problem (harvesting/indexing these sites) by pulling all these parties to the table and acting as a liaison to get them to cooperate (promises of more effective search indexing? Who knows).

I sincerely doubt Google is doing this because they had too much money and a group of 30+ developers that had nothing better to do than to develop an API that will have to be defined, patched, extended and supported for years to come across some of the most heavily visited sites on the internet.

Who wants to play the conspiracy-gPhone angle here? I DO! Here we go…

In a quote from the incredibly handsome Riyad Kalla, Break it Down Blog reports:

This is a preemptive move by Google to further solidify the platforms that the gPhone will support at it’s release beyond just it’s own services (e.g. YouTube).

In order to compete in a space that iPhone is making progress in and a space that Microsoft’s Mobile OS has long dominated, Google will need a compelling mobile software/platform story to sell to vendors to get it to adopt the gPhone, which will be more than a hardware play.

Some other theories is that this move is an attempt to fine-tune ad targeting technologies on these sites which can account for 711% of the traffic on the internet for any given day. While I think this is a valid argument, since Google isn’t going to be hosting these APIs, they don’t have ESP-like insight into the content being served, any more than they did before. It’s possible, I suppose, that instead of scraping the screen of the browser on these sites looking for keywords, behind-the-scenes API calls that Google could make, might provide more detailed information about these users to show them more focused ads (e.g. Facebook page is tagged with ‘Sports’ and ‘Skiing’).

I’m still keeping the stance that this has something to do with creating a social device out of the gPhone and not just a glorified phone or PDA device, I do think the ad angle is a pretty valid point, especially since that’s still Google’s bread and butter service.