OpenSocial not cause for open celebration…yet

Last week Google threw a big party after launching their own developer social networking platform called OpenSocial which effectively competes with facebook’s own API developer platform.

Being the nice company that they are, they also invited all other platforms (including facebook) to join them. Many of them (i.e. LinkedIn, Bebo, MySpace, Plaxo, Hi5, Flixster, Salesforce.com) have already excepted the invitation.

This is significant news that is bound to make the social networking space much more interesting in the coming months as developers can now create one application (or widget) and have the ability to easily port them across multiple platforms.  

Before declaring the end of facebook, consider the following:  

1) Portability of applications across multiple sites is a super idea - but what about portability of identities? People would be far more likely to check out (or check back in) to LinkedIn, Friendster, Myspace and other sites if they had one login / identify that worked across the network of sites.  Do the 50 million facebook users really care that applications are now cross-site compatible? Ah no…

2) Although it’s neat that multiple social networking sites have signed up, individual site policies may heavily impact a developer’s ability to be creative and make money. Some (like LinkedIn), will require approval of the application first and then charge the developer a toll or % or revenue. Unlike facebook which is totally open and toll free, developers (and marketers) may find that a common API does not necessarily equal common or consistent access to the network of sites.  Free and open will always trump mostly free and mostly open.

3) Building portable applications will not make Google’s Orkut more popular in English speaking countries or make Canadians switch to MySpace.  Applications can add to the social graph, but they can’t build or enhance what isn’t there. People joined facebook because all their friends were joining. They stayed on facebook because the user experience is simple for all to interact with.  Applications enriched the experience, but it’s not the core reason why 64% of Canadians return to their facebook profile at least once a day for an average of 32 minutes at a time. Facebook is about the community - not whether or not the applications are portable to other platforms.

To actually encourage mass migration from facebook to other platforms, OpenSocial needs to enable a true open social platform where a single user profile and its corresponding social graph can be accessed from anywhere. That’s a party I will RSVP to in a second.