Facebook VS. Google OpenSocial
Published by Rodney Rumford November 14th, 2007 in Facebook, OpenSocial.Facebook VS. Google OpenSocial: There is lot’s of buzz going around about Google’s OpenSocial API in the developer community. There are many philosophical differences here between the two. I really do not care to take sides or get into a pissing match about which is better or worse or why just yet.
The bottom line here is that OpenSocial is not as easy as all the pr spin might make you to believe. I think the platform is doomed to never become a true standard. It is going to become another option that will help in “widget distribution”.
The bottom line is Google opensocial API is typically deprecated and has less functionality than if I chose to build directly for the Salesforce API as an example. If I am going to build a successful robust widget for Salesforce; why make it less functional by using OpenSocial? Why not make full use of the great full function API that they already have available?
We need to give OpenSocial a chance to show their true colors and see how it evolves over the next 6 months to be fair. The bottom line is we are paying very close attention to what is happening there. Google is trying to get many social networks to adopt it’s API; it’s chances for long term domination are slight.
In the meantime here are 2 resources to check out to separate the wheat from the chaff. Too much hype is being slung around in my humble opinion about Google OpenSocial. I happen to think it makes far mores sense to invest in the facebook platform at this point & for both the near & long term. That is where I would put my smart branding money.
The Google OpenSocial Group on facebook has tons of links and is quickly becoming an amazing resource for content and links regarding the subject.
Additionally the smart people over at Widgebox.com have a blog post that does a very complete comparison of Facebook vs. OpenSocial. I suggest that you give it a read.
“Open Social is a set of social networking application APIs that Google is encouraging all social networks to adopt as their application architecture. Its goal is to standardize social networking apps so that they can be run on more than one social network. It’s meant to challenge Facebook’s tremendous success with their F8 application platform.”
Technorati Tags: facebook, opensocial, google opensocial
OpenSocial has just been announced, it will be nice if it will grow with developers needs like the Facebook platform is evolving on our feedback.
The next Bay Area Facebook Developers Meetup is on 19th (mon) Nov at 6.45 to Google, where Google is presenting OpenSocial, and given that Dave McClure is the moderator, we can expect an excellent discussion.
We would like to hear from developers who have tried OpenSocial and find out where is the limitation and what they would like to see as changes. If you have a Facebook App, you can always demo at the group. If you have experiences/expectations with OpenSocial, we’d love for you to demo too.
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=14310280583 (RSVP on facebook).
Personally, I don’t see it as either or. You develop on Facebook and reach the social graph of 60M users. You can develop on OpenSocial for any of the partnering sites.
Won’t it be awesome if you can extend one to the other in a single App?
Does anyone know if OpenSocial will allow you to pull photos from the different networks? That would be great!