Yahoo! — Putting the “Open” in OpenSocial

For those of my friends who’ve been wondering what I’ve been so heads-down on lately, I’m happy to finally share the news that Yahoo! has announced support for the development of OpenSocial, by working with MySpace and Google to set up an independent foundation for its long-term stewardship. I hope this will turn out to be OpenSocial’s best “container” yet.

OpenSocial is already in the open in the sense that it’s available for use by anyone, and has been since it first came out last November. The spec is published with a Creative Commons license, and there’s reference code put out under an Apache open-source license. There’s been lots of community collaboration on it, and Google has been a good custodian in bringing it this far along.

What putting it in a foundation does is ensure access to the future direction of the spec is open to everyone, and create a way for contributions to be protected from patent lawsuits and IP contamination (for people and companies that have to worry about those arcane but very real kinds of impediment to intellectual collaboration). Most importantly, it means application developers, containers, and would-be contributors alike can take a bet on this technology with the benefit of knowing it’s free (as in beer, and as in speech) forever, that a community of developers is out there building on it, and that they won’t get box-canyoned into proprietary code.

OpenSocial itself still has plenty of maturing to do, but millions of users of twitter, facebook and even old-skool social apps like evite know how great application experiences that tap into your social network can be. Now OpenSocial has every chance to become the Wordpress of social app platforms and yield a similarly rich ecosystem of innovation around it. Kudos to Google here - helping OpenSocial take root by putting it out in the open isn’t just a smart thing to do (even though it means giving up “ownership” of it); it’s the right thing to do.
Helping close this deal for Yahoo! has been a great experience for me personally, too. In addition to helping Yahoo! walk the talk, having a lot of fun, and learning more than I ever thought I would about patent non-assertion, I’ve also gotten to know a very smart and passionate bunch of people at Google, MySpace, and my own employer during this.

So I guess now that it’s public, it’s time to join Orkut and add some new folks to my MySpace, LinkedIn, and Plaxo networks - I’m sure they’ll be inviting me to join causes, share restaurant reviews, and throw monkeys soon!

UPDATE: Blog posts are starting to come in. You probably know where to find them, but I particularly like this quote from CNET: “It’s like the Justice League of social media”!

posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 7:27 am Category: social, yahoo. Comment or trackback.