I’ll admit, most of my friends are on Facebook, MySpace and Friendster, although none of them really use MySpace and Friendster anymore. Facebook has become my actual real life friends base of Internet social operations. Now, I’ve joined many other services (Orkut, Digg, etc.) just to see how they are, and I use StumbleUpon, Digg and Del.Icio.us, but my “real life” friends all aren’t there. It’s quite sad. Only 1 of my friends blogs. I got 5 of my friends interested in reading blogs/rss feeds after I started my blog. However, that’s about the extent.
Now that Google is supposedly releasing their “Social” set of APIs on November 5th, where will I be without my friends to back me up?
TechCrunch recently published:
The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.
On November 5 we’ll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut’s social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more - such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs. And Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform - meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.
And that is a potentially killer strategy. Facebook has a platform to allow third parties to build applications on Facebook itself. But what Google may be planning is significantly more open - allowing third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications. (via TechCrunch Google To “Out Open” Facebook On November 5)
Now, I can share all I want on Google Reader, the new Google Share, Orkut, PicasaWeb, YouTube, etc., but what good will this do for me?
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