Web 2.0 Realiaze by using Mobile WiMAX

At Computex this week, Intel Corp. executive Sean Maloney said microprocessors that are more powerful and high-speed WiMAX wireless networks will usher in a new era of the full Internet on mobile devices.

In his keynote, Maloney also unveiled new chipsets that make high-definition (HD) images on a desktop PC's screen look more realistic. He also announced the availability of new versions of Intel Atom processors for an emerging class of compact, easy-to-use devices called netbooks and nettops that will bring the Internet to new users.

"The convergence of mobile PCs, WiMAX wireless broadband and powerful, HD-rich PC technologies point to a tremendous growth opportunity," said Maloney, Intel executive VP and general manager, sales and marketing group. "Individuals—not households—will drive the next era of growth with people each owning one or more computing devices. People have an innate desire to be 'connected' all the time and see personalized, mobile technology as the way to meet that need."

Redefining mobile

With the emergence of the netbook category this year, Intel believes that this will be the first year that more mobile computing devices will be sold than desktop computers. The company is delivering a variety of high-performance, low-power processors and other advanced computer technologies to help the industry address this opportunity with devices at all price points.

Maloney showed approximately 100 Intel processor and chipset-based motherboards, netbooks and nettops that PC makers are showcasing at Computex. Netbooks are compact mobile devices that children, first-time Internet users and people who desire an extra PC can use for basic computing applications, listening to music, e-mailing and surfing the Internet. They can also be used for playing basic online games, social networking and making VoIP phone calls.

The new Intel 4 Series chipsets will be used in mainstream desktop PCs powered by the latest 45nm Intel Core2 Duo and Intel Core2 Quad processors. Maloney said people want to store all their HD videos, photos, games and music in one "central library" and be able to access it from portable Internet-connected devices while on-the-go.

"The Internet is going 'high-def,'" Maloney said. "Desktop PCs with these new chipsets let you enjoy, share and protect your digital life. They have the processing power and graphics to deliver stutter-free HD video playback, improved 3D performance and leading storage capabilities."

Mobilizing Web 2.0Maloney said ubiquitous wireless Internet access is required to mobilize how people are using the Internet today for things such as creating and watching videos, playing games and sharing photos. He said mobile WiMAX will make the Internet open, fast and mobile and it's quickly progressing toward a healthy global footprint. Informa Telecoms reports that carriers are deploying more than 281 fixed or mobile WiMAX networks today.

Chii-ming Yiin, Taiwan's minister of Economic Affairs also addressed the keynote audience via video at Computex. He described how WiMAX represents the next growth opportunity for Taiwan's technology industry with local hardware, services and network infrastructure companies developing complete WiMAX solutions for use worldwide.

"Mobile WiMAX is the right solution and it's happening now," Maloney added. "Wireless networks will be how the majority of people get connected and they have to be Web 2.0 capable. That means they've got to have a lot of bandwidth to send data either to or from devices at a rapid-fire pace."

PlansNext week, Intel will also introduce processors and some chipsets for its next-generation mobile PC platform called Intel Centrino 2 processor technology, formerly codenamed Montevina, for high-performance laptops. Intel's full line of chipsets and its Wi-Fi wireless product will ship in early August.

Intel has developed an integrated WiMAX/Wi-Fi solution, codenamed Echo Peak that will be available as an option for certain Intel Centrino 2 processor technology-based notebook PCs. The company aims to enable initial availability of certain WiMAX-enabled notebook PCs in the United States in 2H 08 depending on individual computer maker plans and WiMAX network availability.

source: http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800527888_499488_NT_4278df40.HTM

Yahoo's Social Networking Strategy?

TechCrunch points to a Bear Stearns analyst presentation discussed in Barron's about Yahoo's need to develop a social networking strategy. Point blank, TechCrunch asks why hasn't Yahoo acquired a big social networking player yet? What are they waiting for?

Given Peck's valuations, it's time to stop and realize that soon it may be Facebook that would acquire Yahoo at some point. As I told AOL Money & Finance recently, "If Facebook does its branding right by losing its 'college' image, it could be the next Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) of social networking. Facebook has grown in popularity due to the company recently opening up participation from anyone (not just college students), so a lot of business owners and self-promoters are beginning to see success with it. Facebook's platform strategy also entailed opening their API, called F8 Platform, to outside developers. This makes Application development a very hot topic right now -- since companies are now given the ability to build their own programs and branded widgets that run within the Facebook community."

Point is, the future of Web 3.0 is increasingly about widgets, and Facebook's open integration and open API will make it a growing sticky and engaged site, as well as a gaming powerhouse and a web start page along the lines of Netvibes or Pageflakes.

In a reversal of roles, social networking sites may soon be asking themselves if they need to buy Yahoo to increase their online reach.

Source : http://prmachine.blogspot.com/2007/08/yahoos-social-networking-strategy.html

Face book - Good or Bad?

INTRODUCTION

Facebook, like much of the Internet, is a great innovation! It offers you an opportunity to interact with an extraordinarily expansive universe of new people. You can sculpt your on-line identity and learn more about how the Internet and its various programs work to create new relationships and communities. For the entrepreneurially minded, it might be an introduction into business as you think of how to "market" yourself. Individuals with particular social identities or hobbies, say as a Christian gay person or someone who likes a narrow range of military on-line games, can use it to find friends with common interests. Facebook is a cool tool.

People make the technology, not only in the fundamental sense of discovery and invention, but also in the sense that they make it happen and that they contour it in ways that reflect our basic humanity. Our basic humanity is for better or for worse, however. It is vulnerable to context, circumstance and interpretation. And so it is important to remember that Facebook is malleable and creates as many obligations as it does opportunities for expression. Below are five concepts to keep in mind when you use Facebook, if not other programs of personal creativity such as chat rooms or MySpace, on the Internet.

Note: Access to Facebook has changed since this article was published in April 2006; consult Facebook policy for the most current status. More information can also be found in the article A Wider World: Youth, Privacy, and Social Networking Technologies and the panel discussion Facing Facebook and Other Social Networking Technologies.

FIVE THINGS TO THINK ABOUT WHEN USING FACEBOOKI.

1) Invincibility

A long time ago, well before the advent of Facebook, there was a student at an it-shall-go-unnamed university who used a chat room to post some facts about the size of his penis. What a surprise when he went for his first job interview, all nicely tailored in a new suit and armed with a good G.P.A. He was rejected. Fortunate for him, there was a friendly alumnus on the search committee who told him the reason. The HR person on the hiring committee had looked him up on the Internet and found the boasting posting! Frantically, the student called the university officials asking them to remove it. Alas, they could not help him, because a commercial ISP was the domain of the posted information. In time, the student learned about the labyrinthine procedure in which he had to engage in order to have the posting removed. It never occurred to him that a relatively harmless boast could cause him so much trouble.

This example is just one of many. Other examples from around the country include students whose posted pictures of themselves partying bolstered the administration's case when the underage students were charged with alcohol abuse; a student who applied to be a resident advisor but was rejected because staff reviewing applications found material the student had posted on Facebook sites inappropriate; or the students reprimanded for extreme and possibly libelous statements that they made about a professor on their Facebook postings.

2) Caching
In the days before Google became the dominant search engine for the Internet, ISPs that sported chat rooms had policies regarding caching information. Nowadays, Google is the main corporate entity with which one deals when it comes to cached information. To date, Google has tended to be good about removing material within a certain number of days pursuant to a proper request. But let's take a step back and see what caching means.

Caching, in effect, means that if you post something on Facebook, let's say for a day or two, just to be funny or to make a point, even if you take it down or change it, it remains accessible to the rest of the world on the Internet anyway.

Take a moment to think about how you want to "brand" yourself on the Internet. Almost everyone is more complex of a person than a single label can explain, but for most people it takes time and effort, if not real friendship, to get to know people's complexities. Don't give people an excuse to think of you in a single dimensional way. Instead of trying just to fit into a single group, think about yourself as an interesting person with depth of personality and character. What you put out on Facebook about yourself should be an invitation to the rest of the world to get to know you better.

Then consider what it takes to get something removed from Google. You must go through their policy process1 for removing information from their caching technology. Not only is that a lot of bureaucracy, but also you should know that while Google is the dominant search engine on the Internet today, it might not be tomorrow. Moreover, other search engines operate currently on the Internet and so it is not just Google whom you might have to contact in order to remove a page.

3) CU IT Policy: Freedom: No monitoring the network for content
Cornell University is very proud of its policy against monitoring the network for content as a practice. That policy has put the university in good light not merely as a response to content industries that have requested that we monitor in order to enforce their intellectual property rights, but more important as a statement about its role in higher education as research university. Because Cornell is a private not for profit entity, it is not required to observe the First Amendment on free speech. No bother, because as research institution it prizes free inquiry, and free speech is a prerequisite to that exercise. Thus, for Cornell University, free speech is a part of our values as an important center for research, teaching and outreach internationally.

I am sure you have all heard that with freedom comes responsibility. Facebook is an excellent example of that adage. No official at Cornell is going to monitor your posting and make suggestions to you about it, good or bad, either way. Most entering freshmen are young adults and we treat you that way. It is time for you to be away from your families and make your own decisions about who you want to be. This is not because Cornell University does not care, its officials care deeply about you and your development. It is just that we all believe you are of an age and maturity that it is time you learned about freedom and responsibility for yourself. It also means, however, that it is up to you to set your own limits and create your own identity and to be responsible for the consequences, given that you live in the real world of rules, judicial discipline, employers with their own interests as well as other people who, like it or not, will make judgments about what they see.

4) CU IT Policy: Responsibility: No limiting authorized viewers from your site on Facebook or other Internet expressions of your identity.
Here is the responsibility part: no one is going to limit those people who are authorized to use the Internet or view Facebook postings from seeing what you post on-line. The Internet is an open, unlimited international community (that is why it is such an exciting innovation!). Facebook is open generally to .edu addresses and specifically to anyone with a Cornell NetID address. That authorization includes faculty and staff — as well as alumni. Such people might be members of your family, your parent's neighbors, the local bank manager where you want to get a loan for a new car, your insurance agent, an advertising industry in NYC with whom you might want a summer internship, or a law firm where you want to work your second summer of law school — anyone, world wide! Thus, if you are applying for a job as a resident advisor there is nothing keeping the residence hall staff from looking you up. Got JAed for alcohol abuse? The JA can look you up as well. Trying to get a deal on car insurance? Who knows, maybe that little Geico went to Cornell! Do you really want him seeing a photograph of you bombed out of your mind? In other words, there is nothing to keep just about anyone from looking you up. On Facebook, you have absolutely no expectation of privacy.

You also might want to take a moment and reflect on the physical safety of this tool when posting information about yourself. No expectation of privacy combined with the full range of humanity represented in these forums means that you may be exposing yourself to someone who may not have the same values, assumptions about appropriate behavior or may even have a mental defect or disease which could put you at risk as a victim of criminal behavior. Very likely you would not place a placard in the front of your house or dorm describing intimate details of your personal life, private sexual matters, detailed comings and goings or anything else that someone less careful and competent than you might construe as an invitation for communication or even harassment and stalking that could prove dangerous. Use physical space as your guide. What you wouldn't put on a poster on your dorm room door you might want to think two or three times about posting on-line.

5) The Law
Most of the time when we talk about Facebook it is a very individual matter. There is yet another angle to consider: the privacy of others. "Privacy" is a complicated matter in American law. It evokes everything from the right to family planning through Fourth Amendment search and seizure to torts, or civil rights, "to be let alone" in our person.


Watch what you say! If you post an alleged fact about someone that proves incorrect, you may be liable for damages under either defamation or libel. Moreover, if you post photographs or information about someone that can be construed to be an "invasion of their privacy" (say while they were sleeping in their own bed), or "false light" (say suggesting that they are of one sexual persuasion when they are of another), or "misappropriation of likeness" (a claim usually reserved for celebrities, but then again we have them here at Cornell too!) then you may be liable for a tort under the broad rubric of "privacy."

CONCLUSION

Facebook, along with much of the Internet, is a great innovation that allows users to express their humanity and an opportunity to create new communities. As such it represents a forum in which one can make choices about their identity, at least insofar as one chooses to represent themselves publicly. That freedom does not suggest that one can do so with impunity, however. Because we live in a society in which expression is judged in legal, policy and even personal ways, it is important to remember the consequences of that expression no matter how ephemeral or fun in the moment it might seem to be.

This essay offers some things to contemplate when using Facebook, all of which can be summed up easily in a "Golden Rule." Don't say anything about someone else that you would not want said about yourself. And be gentle with yourself too! What might seem fun or spontaneous at 18, given caching technologies, might prove to be a liability to an on-going sense of your identity over the longer course of history. Have fun and make productive use of these new, exciting technologies, but remember that technology does not absolve one of responsibility. Behind every device, behind every new program, behind every technology is a law, a social norm, a business practice that warrants thoughtful consideration.

By Tracy Mitrano, Director of IT Policy and Computer Policy & Law Program, Cornell University
Source: http://www.cit.cornell.edu/policy/memos/facebook.html

Face Book Critics

Facebook is being described as many things today, as pundits, marketers, social scientists and educators try to get a handle of what’s going on in this space. Is it the ‘”connective tissue,” or a “social graph,” a resume, or a utility?

New York Times Op-Ed writer Alice Mathias has a different take on all of this, dismissing it as an place that encourages performances and escapism –a time-sucking hangout of the “Fakebook Generation.” Here is how she describes it:

I’ve always thought of Facebook as online community theater. In costumes we customize in a backstage makeup room — the Edit Profile page, where we can add a few Favorite Books or touch up our About Me section — we deliver our lines on the very public stage of friends’ walls or photo albums. And because every time we join a network, post a link or make another friend it’s immediately made visible to others via the News Feed, every Facebook act is a soliloquy to our anonymous audience.

I know we instinctively want to challenge this notion. But wait. Mathias is not some angry pundit –she’s a grad student who’s grown up on the thing. She makes a solid point that’s worth addressing: Networks like FB, she says, make us miss other valuable parts of human interaction. “Dwelling online is a cowardly and utterly enjoyable alternative to real interaction.”

Source: http://hoipolloi.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/facebook-critic-calls-it-theater/

Intel® Web 2.0 Technology Development Kit (TDK)

On Jan 18 2007, at Mashup Camp 3 in Boston, CV Vick and Clayne Robison launched Intel Web 2.0 TDK, which provides royalty-free Javascript API, binary and source codes to allow you to create web applications by taking advantage of the mobile features on notebooks and UMPCs.

Create Web 2.0 application with the platform and the environment in mind. Leverage information about the platform's configuration and context to provide more expressive interactions and better user experience for your Web 2.0 applications, especially on mobile platforms where intermittent connectivity and limited power are common issues.

Imagine if your Web 2.0 application could be aware of the platform it is running on and its environment. It could, for example, leverage multi-core power to provide more immersive user interfaces, postpone certain tasks during low power situations, avoid network traffic over low bandwidth/high latency connections, etc.

The Intel® Web 2.0 Technology Development Kit (TDK) allows developers to learn about the platform's configuration, e.g. display, storage, processor, and the platform's context, e.g. bandwidth, connectivity, power and location, etc. within a browser using JavaScript.

The Intel® Web 2.0 TDK contains documentation and full source code (C++ and JavaScript) for IE 6/7. The code can be incorporated directly in your extensions or JavaScript libraries, and be redistributed royalty free.

Intel provides support through the online mobile software forums staffed by Intel software engineers to provide information on using the TDK for within Web 2.0 applications.

Highlights


Build Web 2.0 applications that respond gracefully to platform state changes such as power source changes, battery power levels and WiFi signal strength variations.
Detect changes in network connectivity and connection quality and gracefully handle intermittent connectivity
Support offline operation and handle low bandwidth power situations

What's in the Intel Web 2.0 TDK

Intel Web 2.0 TDK Developer Guide (PDF 68KB)
Source code and build scripts for a IE 6/7 browser extensions and a FireFox extensions
JavaScript-based API library
Sample applications
Known issues, bug fixes and work-arounds
Installation instructions
End user license

Key Features

Support for Windows XP* operating system.
Support IE6/7 and Firefox
Allows creation of user-defined callbacks in an object-oriented way to handle specific platform events.
Provides a high-level JavaScript API to get information about battery power states, network connectivity, and processor information, including number of cores.
Power information API
Connectivity information API
Storage information API
Bandwidth information API
Processor information API
Location information API
Download the free Intel Web 2.0 TDK today to enhance your Web 2.0 applications and deliver a better more expressive user experience.
And before you download and use Intel Web 2.0 TDK, please read and accept the license agreement for this web 2.0 TDK.

Pls follow this link for downoading the trial kit!http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/articles/eng/1026.htm

The return of the Web 2.0 Blog and the latest: A Web 2.0 book, Enterprise 2.0, The New New Internet, and much more

It's been an incredible year in 2007 as we've continued to make our way on the "2.0" journey that we embarked upon last year. I thought I'd re-inaugurate this blog with my return to regular posting and to catch up our colleagues, friends, and contacts in the industry with what's been going on with us lately. The good news, much of our current hard work is over and I'm going to be returning more to writing and speaking in the near future, though I'm always going to work closely with clients.

Building a dedicated business around helping organizations transform themselves to the business models of the 21st century has proven to be no minor task. Founding Hinchcliffe & Company as well as creating our enormously popular Web 2.0 University, growing a close-knit passionate team, crafting a set of quality consulting and education products that we believe in, all the while keeping customers happy has been an enormous effort, consuming virtually all of our time. However, we've begun to see the fruits of our labor by seeing our clients and partners succeed in applying Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 to invigorate themselves, grow, and innovate. Along the way we have been rewarded with an absolutely top-notch set of clients and valued industry contacts.

As to our future, the good news is that the key catchphrases of our business, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, seem to be as popular as ever. In fact, surprising as it seems for those of us who have been involved in them for the last few years, I believe that 2008 will be the first truly mainstream year for both of these of strategic new approaches to business and technology.

We have a lot of very exciting projects in the works that we'll announce over the next few months. I'm also pleased to go on record predicting that 2008 will be one of the most interesting years in the business as organizations begin to globally grapple in earnest with the disruptive business models of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 which we see advancing on virtually all industries and institutions today.

As I have in the past, I'm going to use this blog to cover mainstream Web 2.0 topics while using my ZDNet blog to focus specifically on enterprise applications of Web 2.0. Stay tuned.

What else have we been doing lately? Plenty as it turns out...


New Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 publications, education, events, and partnerships

1) A new Web 2.0 book. We've just help complete a major new book on the topic of Web 2.0 with Adobe's Duane Nickull and Redmonk's James Governor, due for publication from O'Reilly shortly. You can read James' take on it on his blog as well as Duane's recent blog overview of it.
2) A new Enterprise 2.0 course. Our Enterprise 2.0 Bootcamp has recently finished development after successful trials at major conferences such as Interop and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. It will be offered shortly as part of Web 2.0 University. You can attend in locations around the world or it can be brought to your organization.

3) Refining the revolution. We recently posted our latest assessment of how to use Web 2.0 social platforms in the workplace in The State of Enterprise 2.0 on ZDNet.

4) A conference on Enterprise 2.0. I'm speaking at Avenue A Razorfish's Reinventing the Enterprise summit this Friday in Boston, MA. I'll be covering the latest topics on Enterprise 2.0 along with Jimmy.

5) A major event on Web 2.0 in Business. We are speaking at and sponsoring the East Coast's largest Web 2.0 conference, The New New Internet in Tyson's Corner, VA on November 1st, 2007. I'm hosting an armchair discussion with Salesforce.com's Peter Coffee and Amazon's Jeff Barr. There are still a few tickets left for this event, and you can use my special registration discount code at this link to save off the retail price of admission.


6) We help take Web 2.0 to Europe. Web 2.0 Expo Berlin is kicking off next month on November 5th. Mark the date, we'll be there to provide a half-day version of Web 2.0 University as a workshop on the first day. It was enormously popular at Web 2.0 Expo SF in April with over 600 people attending in a standing room only crowd. I'm also giving an extensively updated talk on the rise of Web widgets and new online distribution models which was also very popular at the last Expo.

7) Web 2.0 University(tm) is coming to DC. On November 16th, the world's leading learning event on Web 2.0 is coming to Washington, DC. Thousands of business leaders around the world have attended this strategic business event to rave reviews. Seating is limited to sign up now to make sure you're there. Web 2.0 University will also be given in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and San Francisco in the next few months.

8) We expand globally. We have recently licensed Web 2.0 University to one of the top consulting firms in Europe. Reply will exclusively deliver our leading courses courses to their clients and the general public in Italy and Germany. We've also established a partnership with LG CNS of Korea on bringing Web 2.0 consulting and education to Korea ( press release in Korean).

9) New faces. We've had some key new additions to our executive line-up. Denise Kalos and John Fandel have come over to us from O'Reilly Media and have deep experience with Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 solutions around consulting, education, and online communities that support Web 2.0 initiatives.
Source: Please do keep in touch in comments below, via Facebook, or contact directly at dion@hinchcliffeandco.com.

The 6 essential things you need to know about Google's OpenSocial

I've spent the last few days keeping track of the seemingly endless stream of news and blog coverage about Google's new OpenSocial model for social networking applications. OpenSocial has been described by some as Google's industry "chess move" to outmaneuver and corner Facebook.

This is fascinating set of developments to watch since Google's own growing social networking platform, Orkut, was eclipsed by Facebook in terms of overall traffic back in September.

Unless you've been hiding under a rock lately, you know that Facebook is presently the industry darling in social networking, having largely pushed MySpace off the industry's stage, as it seems to offer a more compelling model for social interaction to users overall. Just as importantly, Facebook also lets any other company that wants to join in party do so by building 3rd party Facebook applications, of which over 7,100 now exist, making Facebook increasingly rich in functionality and content by leveraging the creative capacity at the edge of the Web.

In the Web 2.0 era (and in all computing eras before), the central truism is that a platform beats an application every time. This applies here with a vengeance and MySpace and other social networking sites have suddenly rushed to embrace openness and 3rd party widgets and gadgets to such an extent that MySpace has thrown in with Google on OpenSocial.

So the damage is done and in the fickle world of online social networking, Facebook currently has the upper hand. This demonstrates yet again a powerful but counterintuitive aspect of networked software: the more control you give away, the more value you can get back.

However, much of the blogging around OpenSocial would have you believe that has Google now trounced the competition with a strategic move that counters Facebook's open SNS platform move with an open SNS application model that can work everywhere else too. At least, that is, the other social networking sites that support OpenSocial's API.

But as Don Dodge noted in his OpenSocial coverage this isn't going to stop developers from building apps natively for Facebook any time soon and will have little practical effect on existing Facebook users for quite a while. Not to mention the rest of the Web, since not even a single real OpenSocial application yet exists.

That's not to say however that OpenSocial doesn't have its advantages. Joe Kraus, a Director of Product Management at Google, wrote today on the Official Google blog that OpenSocial will make life easier for developers "because it makes it easier for them to focus on making their web apps better; they get lots of distribution with a lot less work. It's good for websites, because they can tap into the creativity of the largest possible developer community (and no longer have to compete with one another for developer attention). And finally, it's good for users, because they get more applications in more places."

So, despite the early beginnings, does OpenSocial make sense from the production side of social networking applications? It still remains to be seen, despite the enormous amount of early partner support for it, if the consumption side in terms of these kinds of applications really generates value. Most of the applications on Facebook provide so little actual utility that they are barely worth installing. While making these mini-apps portable between social networking sites is convenient -- and it probably will appreciably increase the total number of available social applications -- it's really people and the network effect they represent for a given social networking site that makes the site truly valuable. In other words, if my friends and colleagues aren't on the social networking site I use, then that site is of little or no use to me, even if I can take my apps with me.

It'll be interesting to see what ultimately happens to OpenSocial. I suspect it will actually see fairly good uptake since it's based on the highly successful Google Gadgets model, for which over 23,000 different Gadgets presently exist. But will it change the playing field in the social networking wars? Probably not as much as a federated social identity would. Federated social identity could potentially let you exist and participate simultaneously in all the social networks you wanted to at once using one set of social metadata you control. That's probably a lot closer to the Facebook killer that so many are looking for and things like openid are bring that world closer to reality all the time.

In the meantime, here's the six things you absolutely have to know about OpenSocial to have an opinion about it:

6 Essential Things You Need To Know About Google's OpenSocial

1. OpenSocial only offers the lowest common denominator, not the full richness of each social networking platform. While application developers can create apps using the OpenSocial model and they will be able to run on dozens of different social networking sites, OpenSocial can't help you leverage the full capabilities of the site it runs on. Social networking site APIs aren't anywhere as complex as say, the Windows APIs, but we've seen this before with platforms such as Java, where the development model can't support the full capabilities of the underlying operating systems. Like Java, write once, test everywhere is the name of the game for OpenSocial and while economies in this model certainly exist, a single universal widget model tends to discourage product differentiation in favor of broad distribution. This means to get at the full richness of the underlying platform and create a competitive product, you have do custom coding for that site and you've just broken the reason to use a common application model.

2. OpenSocial is largely based on open standards and there's only minor developer lock-in. Overall, it actually seems pretty safe to do a lot of your social application development using OpenSocial. It uses the essential browser open standards of XML, HTML, Javascript, and the data formats are all ATOM and RESTful/WOA. You can even host Flash content and functionality inside the OpenSocial application as long as you don't break the rules. Finally, most of the really popular development platforms, including Ruby on Rails, can support the server-side API. All in all, Google seems to have stuck to a fairly open and non-proprietary model including avoiding crufty proprietary markup. OpenSocial documentation and sample code all uses the Creative Commons licensing and Apache 2.0, and the OpenSocial FAQ says everything will be open sourced at some point. Kudos for this open stance, Google.

3. OpenSocial is a real doorway to social networking data portability as well as potential security holes. A site that supports OpenSocial applications provides that application with all the people data in that user's account. Their own info as well as their friends. This can be used to export user's social data from sites that don't support themselves directly and it could even be used to knit together a person's social data across other social sites that support OpenSocial, with properly designed 3rd party apps. But it also opens the door to security problems and expect to see that security, cross-site scripting, and exploits become an issue over time, as it always does when platforms open up to the rest of the world. Update: Michael Arrington has reported that the first OpenSocial app has now been hacked.

4. OpenSocial is simple and straightforward but also capable of developing full-blown, rich Internet applications. And without server-side infrastructure. Developers can simply innovate with a few bits of markup and procedural code and drop it into the OpenSocial ecosystem and leverage the massive audiences and scalable infrastructure of OpenSocial compliant sites. OpenSocial even supports powerful interactive Web user interface models like Ajax explicitly. Like we saw last year, with the new productivity-oriented Web development platforms, this will change what's possible while also creating mountains and mountains of relatively useless, uninteresting apps amongst a few real gems. But a lot more wildflowers will bloom on the OpenSocial landscape and some will likely rise up and show us how useful these applications can be.

5. OpenSocial is from Google and excessive philanthropy should not be expected. Google almost certainly thinks OpenSocial will ultimately be very good for Google, if not outright bad for a few others (probably Facebook). While the openness is encouraging, if OpenSocial is successful, Google has a plan to make that success work for it. Those plans may not always be to the benefit of everyone playing under the OpenSocial umbrella. User beware.

6. A new era in competency in social software is being ushered in by models like OpenSocial. A lot more social applications are being created because of open social platforms have become so popular. But building successful social applications is a lot different prospect from building traditional business and consumer applications. Expect that many developers and software designers will fail to build applications successfully until we learn that a different focus and way of thinking is required. I've written before about the basic rules for building good social applications, but these are just the beginning. Understanding people is the key to building effective social networking applications, and that is often the hardest thing for us in an industry obsessed with connecting with each other via 1s and 0s.

Source: http://web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com/
Put your ideas in comments below or drop a line at dion@hinchcliffeandco.com.