Google Gives Up On “Open Social” Idea, Closes API
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They're shutting down the (cool but forgotten & neglected) Social Graph API that Brad Fitzpatrick created when he moved over to Google. It has the word "social" in its name, I guess.
That said it wouldn't be completely unexpected if they dropped OpenSocial from my.google.com. What do the Google+ games use?
Google gave me a statement saying they are separate things, which I added, but it still wasn't clear how this may or may not be impacting OpenSocial. So, I asked again.
It's been two hours now, so if it was a crystal clear answer, I'd have expected to heard. My guess is that they are more interrelated, but as I said, hope to get more clarification.
Social Graph API: http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/docs/api.html
OpenSocial FAQ: http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/faq.html
OpenSocial Specs: http://docs.opensocial.org/display/OSD/Specs
Snark aside, OpenSocial is a gadget and container specification built around the Google Gadgets spec. The Social Graph API is a service to let you query information about connections between web pages.
I've written some Google Gadgets (OpenSocial apps) and took a quick look through the Social Graph API spec (a much simpler spec). I sure don't see any connection between them. What's the connection that you see?
Two hours is an incredibly long time for Google to respond to something like that, where there's story out in error. It's a long time to respond period. I know, because I'm in contact with them all the time. That's typically a sign they don't quite know what to say.
Clearly, that wasn't the case here. I did look at the OpenSocial site, and a few of the pages within it. There did seem to be a possible connection between the two. Despite my initial language that did qualify things, it was still too strong.
Excuses aside, and as Kevin Marks notes elsewhere in comments here, the OpenSocial idea was initially put out there as some type of way that Google would unite the web to help share social information for developers to use -- to pull in profile info, friend info and activities. And it wasn't positioned as just some type of social gadget building tool.
That's what it seems to have devolved into. Just curious from anyone, is Google feeding Google+ information into OpenSocial?
The connection I was seeing was now that Google has its own social network, and its own set of social signals, it seemed less interested in potentially ensuring there was an ecosystem of sharing everyone's social signals out there.
http://www.google.com/s2/search/social
Looks like this is Google betting purely on an owned graph via Google+