Wishful thinking, and OpenSocial limitations
Astonishing. I believe the term of art is confirmation bias. I plead guilty and to a degree I would not have believed possible.
I saw the announcements, listened, and watched. I then went and read - but didn't actually understand - the OpenSocial API Documentation. The disconnect was that I so badly want to believe that customers own their own data, that I understood the phrase "social applications across multiple websites" to mean any websites. Dumb. And naive.
I didn't actually get it until about 48-hours ago.
I reread the API. It seems more clear to me now that rather than giving me "open" access to social information, what's actually happening is that I'm getting access to social data that I may use only in the context of the offering application. If in fact I have it right this time, that means I can write the same trivial Facebook style app in several places.
That's better than nothing, and does offer some possibilities around a more distributed service experience. But it's not what I was looking for.
In hindsight, it's obvious to me that it could hardly have been otherwise? Who would ever think that a user would actually own his own social information and be able to use it as he liked. I suppose in fairness, we users wouldn't have digital versions of our social information if it weren't for the social apps that collected it for us. And why would they ever give any of that away? But, are we satisfied with that? Do we have a choice?
Licensing the data might work as Mark Cuban suggested in a recent post of his. As a user, I'd be willing to pay something for access to my own data. The ability to apply it to a new service, and thereby enrich my experience therein, would be worth something. Is that a business model idea?
I believe O'Reilly was expressing similar lamentations last Wednesday:
Would OpenSocial let developers build a personal CRM system, a console where I could manage my social network, exporting friends lists to various social networks? No. Would OpenSocial let developers build a social search application like the one that Mark Cuban was looking for? No.
We don't want to build more applications that look like Facebook applications. It isn't about a social UI. It's about deeper re-use of social data to enliven any application.
Amen.
Live and learn.