Besides one point that I don’t see anywhere is that OpenSocial is a ticket to Orkut, which is extremely popular here in India. Most of us trying to make a living here, would love to get inside Orkut, and connect with the people I meet everyday.

Anyhow, I just hope that we can get this work someday :
facebook -list movies | imdb -trivia | blogger -addToSidebar

I’m hoping that Open Social beats everyone to the “let my data go!” experience, because wouldn’t that just be nuts? Wouldn’t that be a lot closer to the moment when we can envision using all these various apps against our data in interesting ways?

Phase 1 isn’t all that and a bag of chips, and maybe it’s just marketing to get developers to settle in. But if Phase 2 was something about clever ways to move our data around, that’d be swell!

Correct, this is not open data yet and so no attention economy. But it is a step in the right direction. If we can get social networks to adapt and implement the common API there is a hope that retailers will do it as well.

Interestingly Facebook’s Beacon’s were embraced by many right away because there is a traffic back to the retailers. So they are okay to send the content into the network as long as there is a link back.

In any case, for a long time I thought that Attention data needs to be sent to a user-controlled attention store and then routed to the service of choice. Alas, given our tech world its rather difficult, so instead NxM API solution is what we can hope for.

But as always – time will tell.

Alex

OpenSocial doesn’t provide a mechanism for services to exchange information about users.

It’s a very treacherous piece of functionality, note the outrage of MoveOn.org about Facebook’s sharing of information about people’s purchasing habits.

What we need, as a cautious first step, is for vendors to give control of user data to the users. A great example continues to be the movie rating information kept by Netflix and Yahoo Movies (there are others). I’ve lobbied both companies, directly, to provide an export for this data to users of their services, at which point I would happily take the campaign to companies who have services that could use this data (e.g. dating services). So far neither company has been willing to give the users control of this data.

OpenSocial is a cloud of fog, indeed clearly aimed at confusing the market about Facebook’s success. Near as I can see, there isn’t a single bit of good VRM news in there.