Hacker News Reader

"OpenSocial is built upon Google Gadget technology, so you can build a great, viral social app with little to no serving costs...."

That's great. I can do all the programming work, the users can do all the work of setting up their social network, and Google can keep all of our data for us. Gee. What a deal.

View on HN

Google doesn't have to keep your data for you. The OpenSocial API is just a specification. Google's own applications implement the specification, and you can too. The API is designed to be able to work with data on any host. It's in the very nature of the addressability of the API's data. Look in the documentation, and you'll see lots of URIs that look like:

http://{domain}/feeds/people/{user-id}

Notice that "domain" is a variable. In any case, why would you worry about Google being able to store data that is publicly accessible through a standardized API?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com