I have my Facebook life and my MySpace life. I suppose I could really have profiles all over the web if I desired. But, who has the time? There is constant maintenance, uploading pictures so that everyone knows what you've been up to, writing on walls, stalking other people's profiles etc. Why can't someone come up with a way for all my friends on all my networks to be combined into one? One login, one password, one profile about my interests (it feels lame enough to list "curling up with a book" as an interest, please don't make me write it out ten times!)
It seems like Google may have come up with a quasi-solution, and its name is OpenSocial. Joe Kraus, Director of Product Management writes on the Google Blog
"we're excited to introduce OpenSocial, a set of common APIs that make it easy to create and host social applications on the web. OpenSocial allows developers to write an application once that will run anywhere that supports the OpenSocial APIs."
You mean now I'm going to get bitten by Vampires on MySpace too! Well, not exactly, because Facebook isn't apart of the OpenSocial network, yet. But, I have to ask, is there anyone out there who really enjoys all of these applications? Because I certainly don't. And I'm not really excited about the fact that developers will be able to post their applications on a variety of hosts.
Joe also writes,
"All these social networks are looking to give their communities more and more things to do -- and they realize they can't do it on their own."
Um, where did he get this idea. And I want to know who the people are that want more applications and more time wasted from their social networking sites?
Give me my friends, good searching abilities in order to find them, a profile picture, some personal info (it makes the stalking more fun), the ability to write my friends messages and get their contact info and I will be happy. Because I don't want to play online poker with them, I don't want to throw sheep, I don't want to be a zombie and I won't want to rate which people I am most like. I want to write to them and maybe even give them a call so that we can meet up and socialize the old fashioned way.
At first I was excited to read about OpenSocial because I thought it would be a way to connect my many different networks into one. I'm not an expert and correct me, please, if I'm wrong, but that doesn't seem to be the point of OpenSocial. More so, it is to benefit the developers, their prized applications and maybe, the prized advertising dollars that these applications rake in?
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Honestly, I don’t know anyone who has time for so much online social networking. Like you, I would rather use these tools as a gateway to in-person socializing. It might be that I don’t really use any of the sheep throwing applications, but I don’t really see the need to make it easier to host more applications. I know they say that this will be better for consumers but I think you are dead on. This seems like a way to gain some hefty advertising dollars.
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