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.

There should be nothing more important to you than how your online identify is managed and protected. Mashable has a great overview of the top 25 ways you can manage your online profile including tools to manage your reputation, officically sign documents, aggregate your profiles and other cool stuff.

I’m not sure how well this works yet, but there certainly appears to be momentum building for the universal profile / avatar concept discussed previously in this blog.

What do you think? How are you managing your online identity… have you consolidated to one main account or do you continue to manage multiple but similar profiles?

I’ve also now created a seperate category around identity 2.0 to track trends and noise in this space. Also thanks to my friend David from Ottawa for finding the great cartoon!

As reported by Michael Garrett at profy, LinkedIn plans to release a developer API platform that would allow people to create new widgets or applications for LinkedIn - similar to what facebook did this year and what other sites such as MySpace and Friendster have announced they will do in order to slow down user migration to other social networking sites.  Although there are some great potential outcomes of this announcement, there are a few reasons why I believe their strategy needs further evaluation: 

1) Creating a walled garden within a walled garden. Applications developed on the new API platform must first get reviewed and approved before they can be made available to the community. This will stifle innovation. Let developers build what they want and let the community of LinkedIn users decide what is relevant or not.  

2) Developers will have to share revenue with LinkedIn…which is the opposite of where the industry is going. Given the user migration to facebook from other platforms in the last 8 months (LinkedIn included), why would a developer focus energy on a restrictive environment when they can create professional based applications and reap all the benefits from it on facebook? facebook is not just about sending electronic hamburgers… it’s increasingly also about professionals connecting in a simple, user-friendly environment where they make their own decisions on what is relevant or not.  Developers should be rewarded for their innovation.  

3) LinkedIn is not about engagement. Or community. As quoted on profy, they are not trying to get users to come back to the site multiple times a day. If you’re not trying to create engagement you aren’t going to increase your social graph. Isn’t social networking about engagement? If you are marketing a product or service, would you rather integrate it within a community like facebook that sees nearly 50% of their users return every day for at least 20 minutes, or with a site like LinkedIn that doesn’t care if you come back with any regular or predicted frequency?

4) Charging for premium services. Information should be free. LinkedIn still charges for their premium services. Free is a business model.  People are making money by giving stuff away and profiting from the engagement created.  Mitch Joel highlighted this in a recent post here.

Having said all of the above, there is great potential for LinkedIn to create something special and of value by allowing developers to create LinkedIn widgets that can be exported to other websites (even to facebook) with no restrictions, review processes, or threat of revenue sharing.

The future of social networking includes the idea of portability of identity - to other mediums (like mobile) and to other communities. Creating easy to export widgets that go beyond linking to somebody’s profile page on LinkedIn and creates true engagement based on permissions and profiling could create a massive increase in LinkedIn’s social graph….which they can profit from without taxing developers or their commmunity users. 

Understanding that LinkedIn has some specific goals with their new platform, they can still achieve them more transparently by offering rewards or incentives to developers for applications or widgets that meet specific criteria or goals in line with what they think people want.

Image credit: Pulse2.0