So I read Om Malik's post Tuesday about OpenSocial - Google's platform for social networks. Exciting stuff!
Having the day off on Wednesday meant that I missed some shuffling on this story and then today, when details were scheduled to be released, even more players came to the fore when the press conference was moved up.
Google's OpenSocial is a set of commons APIs for use with all social networks that participate. This is different from Facebook who developed their own markup language which does not play with others…at all.
Marc Andreessen has a good screencast showing OpenSocial working on his blog. His Ning network is one of those taking part.
TechCrunch has a piece with the update news release and the new players, including MySpace (abandoning their own markup languauge), LinkedIn and Salesforce.com so this is not just about seeing what your "friends" favorite movie is. This can, and will, impact businesses as well as their employees in and out of the workplace.
Now I haven't seen any chatter about where Social Network Portability fits in, which is a shame, but with open and shared APIs that are based around normal HTML etc. it can't be too far behind.
This is definitely something to keep an eye on over the coming months.
Technorati tags: opensocial, google, microformats, social+networks,api
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