I finally found an hour or two to read a bit more into OpenSocial - the innovation (?) promoted by Google to ‘make the web more social’.

On the homepage is a nice link to a 57 minute YouTube video - that I couldn’t get enough bandwidth to stream acceptably, so I watched the chunks - all six of them - and I’m feeling not very well.

How corny could they make this presentation? Initially I was put off by the symbolism of the fires, and the play on ‘open’:

“We believe this format of bringing developers together in an intimate setting to work collaboratively in the open, is the best way to engage with the developer community”

In other words, they approach a select few ‘partners’ and say ‘we’re going to make this big announcement - jump on board or miss the wagon!’ They make it look cosy by doing the presentation outside, but I doubt there was anyone in the ‘audience’ not part of the launch, and I’m surprosed they didn’t sing any songs - there was enough of a dance.

Google are starting to get on my nerves a bit - you can’t help but see them everywhere, and I’m getting a bit suspicious of motives.

I like the idea of OpenSocial - if I get it right - it’s like the Facebook developers platform, but open so anyone can use it. Great. But they seem to have gone a bit further by putting JavaScript gizmos and methods on top. Not so sure. I’m not a fan of all this Ajax - it too often is bling for bling’s sake and gets in the way of sensible functionality.

I’m not totally anti the rich user experience - times I’ve seen it done well it is neat, but it can be overdone, or inappropriately applied. Much like technology as a whole. I’m a KISS person myself.

So perhaps I should just concentrate on the Data APIs and concepts, and not get put off by the ’shiny’ distractions.

Anyway, back to OpenSocial - it seems to have a good amount of adoption by the PR - if there’s a critical mass it might take off. But I remember a similar hubub around OpenID and that one has gone quiet.

This open stuff is great for developers perhaps, but isn’t everything ending up looking the same? Yes MySpace jumped in because they’ve been hurt my the Facebook API no doubt. And all these business networks are all like LinkedIn - where’s the USP? They’ll all end up like Ning where it’s who’s using an application makes it stand out rather than the application itself.