Will OpenSocial Become the Defacto Standard?

This morning I wrote about the new OpenSocial foundation. Unfortunately I missed out on the press call but there were definitely some key takeaways. Marshall Kirkpatrick provides a great writeup of the call. Two significant statements made was that Orkut will go live next week and that 200 million users will be reached by all the applications.

Who wasn’t present on the phone call? Facebook and Microsoft. These are the two remaining companies that have not joined OpenSocial. They are still holding out an ultimately are trying to battle the underdog who has gained significant momentum: OpenSocial. It’s hard to call any standard promoted by Google an “underdog” but technically there are less application install on their platform but more potential users.

So this leads me to question where all of this is going. One conclusion that I have is that these standards are much larger than the initial group of developers that were successful on Facebook. While we still see some of the leaders making a presence on MySpace, there a number of new players but strangely enough most of them are still the traditional players on the social web.

Conversely, much of what we are seeing is a battle taking place, much of which is being done through press releases and some of which is being done by developers. The social web is also getting a whole lot more complex. As Scot Kveton from the OpenID foundation said, “I think this is great – they are doing all o fthe right things with the non-assertion covenant but its another foundation. Its more work for companies to join, etc. So now you have openid, opensocial, oauth is going to have to do something, microformats, etc – this gets pretty complicated IMHO.”

Ultimately what we would like is for things to become a lot more simple but in the short-run it appears as though things will have to get a lot more complex before it gets easy. This is great for those helping companies navigate the social web though. There will be a lot more business headed towards consultants in this space over the coming months.