Earlier this week I had the opportunity to speak with Kevin Marks of Google about the current state of Friend Connect, OpenSocial, and the future of the social web. Friend Connect was initially seen as one of the methods for “out opening Facebook”. In other words Google was concerned about Facebook’s growing ownership of users’ identities on the web. While the initial steps were made for competitive purposes, OpenSocial has become part of a greater movement to simplify the models for sharing our social data around the web.
oAuth, Portable Contacts, and other standards have become core components of what is now called the open stack. FriendConnect is an implementation of a number of the open stack standards. Facebook has been taking an increasing number of steps toward opening up and has signaled that they may soon be willing to operate their services using the open stack. One of the latest steps was to joining the OpenID foundation board back in February.
The standardization of the services running behind the scenes on the social web are still being developed including things like activitystrea.ms and DiSo. If you are confused about the standards don’t worry because all of this information will be taking place behind the scenes. All the users need to know is that standards will soon make it easier for all of our social activities to integrate with any service that is connected to the web.
In my podcast with Kevin we talk about everything from the state of these open standards to what the future holds. Check out my interview with him in the player below!
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