Throughout the day I've been reading various blog posts and comments about Google's new OpenSocial effort. For the most part, it seems as if people are getting the wrong idea about how OpenSocial works, or simply, just what the hell it is. Particularly, I don't really understand posts like this, that just have it plain wrong. I mean, really, Google would never exercise that much control. Its going to be up to the social networks to implement the standard within their own application. Sure, it could "tie together" social networks, but that will largely be up to other application developers and their brilliant minds.

Perhaps its difficult for people who don't develop web applications (actually write code) to understand that this is just an effort to standardize public API's across social networking services. I'm rather excited about the possibility of being able to develop an Actionscript library that can perform the same exact method calls (getPerson, getFriends, addActivity, etc.) and just have to specify the service to use (LinkedIn, Orkut, etc. ). At least thats how I'm envisioning all this.

I also find it funny that a lot of people are getting all anxious over the possibility of Facebook refusing to implement the standard. Facebook is certainly in its own little world. While its a pretty good example of a web application that offers a public data API, it still has a bit of a "pet project" feel to it and I don't feel as if the owner/creator is that concerned with adopting an API standard. Developers are already happily using their API with good success. Perhaps it will hurt them in the long run, but even if they become late adopters, its going to be a standard API, thus making it easy for developers to add Facebook into their existing OpenSocial standard apps.

In the end, I'm pretty stoked about this, but probably only because I'm a developer.