Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
News
Google Seeks Social Networking High Ground
11/5/2007
Google's attempt to grab moral high ground in the social networking development is a step in the right direction, according to industry analysts.
Google late last week said it released a set of "open APIs" that will enable developers to build applications to run across a broad range of social networking environments.
The advantage of this "OpenSocial" effort for developers of both consumer and enterprise apps, would be the theoretical ability to write an application once that could then run across a wide swath of social networking environments.
Google claimed backing not only from such social networking powers as LinkedIn, Friendster, Orkut, Plaxo, and Xing, but from Oracle and Salesforce.com as well. Not among the names of supporters: Microsoft and FaceBook. Microsoft just bought a $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the popular social networking leader, either outbidding or outfoxing Google, which was also interested in Facebook.
A developer sandbox will soon be online at http://sandbox.orkut.com to enable developers to start playing with and testing the APIs, Google said. As of November 1, three APIs, sample code, documentation and online support were available from the Google OpenSocial site. With user permission, developers can use the APIs to access user profile information, friend lists and shared activities to start planning their ideas.
Developers want volume distribution and portability, so Google's plan makes sense. There is a huge potential audience among all those LinkedIn, Plaxo, Orkut users out there, said Dana Gardner, principal with Inter-Arbor Solutions, a Gilford, NY market analysis firm.
"If you create a widget or a storefront or commerce site, you don't want it to run just in FaceBook. You want it at all the sites, just like Crate & Barrel wants its stores in all the malls," Gardner said. "Social nets can come and go. Nothing locks you in as a user or a developer. You're not writing to an operating system but to a social network platform on the Web."
While Microsoft lured developers into the Visual Studio toolset with the promise of the huge addressable Windows installed base, there is no such ubiquity in online social networks.
"These social nets popped up like mushrooms in the spring rain and can disappear just as fast. They are much more fickle than an operating system, so tools that will let a developer address a wide variety of them are important," Gardner said.
But a lot of work needs to be done. "This is important because it's Google and in the consumer world that's huge. Google hasn't really made a firm or aggressive answer to the whole social networking phenom--Facebook etc.--so, when it looks at its assets, why not attack with openness?" said Mike Gotta, analyst with The Burton Group.
Corporate developers, on the other hand, will need to see some set of standards and rules, he added. "This may be open, but there's no standards body, not that standard bodies are a panacea. If you look at what Jabber has done with XMPP, they have an open standard. Corporate developers will want to know what the governance body is behind it, how the standard will evolve, who'll kick the tires, and what happens if people take the process in a different direction."
Recommended Reading
- Tufts Grants Rights for Mileage-Increasing Transportation Technology to Electric Truck
Tufts University has optioned rights to a technology that can recharge the batteries of any hybrid electric and electric-powered vehicle while it is driven. The Tufts-developed technology could increase by 20 percent to 70 percent the miles per gallon or total driving range performance of vehicles like the Honda Civic, Ford Escape, and Toyota Prius hybrids and the Tesla Motors and Phoenix Motorcars electric vehicles.
- U Florida and Cyntellect Collaborate to Unlock Mysteries of Cancer Stem Cells
The University of Florida has entered into a research agreement with life sciences company Cyntellect. The university's Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research will work with the company to focus on a variety of research areas including the purification and analysis of cancer stem cells (CSCs), rare cells believed to be directly involved in propagating cancers.
- George Mason U Receives Grant To Deploy Intergraph Apps for Intelligence Curriculum
George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, VA has been awarded a grant from Intergraph to enable students enrolled in GMU's Geospatial Intelligence Graduate Certificate program to use the company's geospatial production and exploitation software as part of their core curriculum.
- Institute for Cyber Security at U Texas, San Antonio Opens Incubator
The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) has launched a new Internet security incubator. The incubator was developed to commercialize promising technologies that address major cyber security and privacy issues. The first companies to enter the incubator are Denim Labs and SafeMashups.
- ISO/IEC Publishes Office Open XML Standard
ISO/IEC has published the Office Open XML (OOXML) file format standard, formally known as ISO/IEC 29500:2008. It describes file formats originally designed by Microsoft for its Office 2007 productivity suite, which are used in presentation, spreadsheet and word processing applications.
- Dynamics NAV 2009 ERP Coming Next Month
Microsoft exec Kirill Tatarinov Wednesday described some new features to expect in the forthcoming Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 enterprise resource planning solution. He gave the keynote address at Microsoft's Convergence 2008 event in Copenhagen, Denmark.
