Ask HN: Is the OpenSocial API dead?

2 points·bencollier49··2 comments

Is the Open Social standard dead in the water? I notice the last release of the standard was five years ago? Is it still a going concern?

This question comes off the back of an article in the current issue of the Economist, which apparently (I am told) suggests that legally mandated Open APIs might be the solution to the monopolies of Facebook, Google et. al.

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As far as I know, the consortium who originally created and backed OpenSocial is pretty much dead. That doesn't necessarily mean the standard is "dead dead" though. Some products still implement it and there are still products coming out that will support it. I can say this because we're working on one of those products at Fogbeam Labs.

Sadly the open-source reference implementation, Apache Shindig, fell into a state of inactivity to the point that the ASF project was moved to the Attick, but the code is still available and can be forked anytime.

Likewise for the standard itself... if people are interested in this sort of thing, a group can always create a new version of the standard, or - depending on copyright / license / blah - create a successor standard.

If anyone reading this is interested in either Shindig or the OpenSocial spec, or both, feel free to drop me a line at prhodes@fogbeam.com. I'd love to keep in touch with anybody still interested in / working on stuff in this area.

Edit: just found this:

https://www.w3.org/blog/2014/12/opensocial-foundation-moves-...

Looks like anything current going on with OpenSocial is here now.

https://www.w3.org/Social/WG

micro.blog implements a few of those protocols, websub & micropub, kudos to Manton Reece. He links to an interesting group that seems to be more relevant than the W3C: IndieWebCamp <https://indieweb.org/>, and info about the connections between the two groups <https://indieweb.org/W3C>

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