Beth’s wonderful post about a decision tree for whether or not an organization should get into the social networking business had a link to a comment about OpenSocial. The salient quote:
Why not roll your own social network, include the OpenSocial API, and have applications, groups, widgets and portals to your site in any number of the “OpenSocial” platforms? Whether an existing member of your organization chooses to participate in any social network or not should not affect your decision to have a presence (group and/or application) in the social-networking space.
Which lead me to think about the idea of open sourcing OpenSocial apps. It seems to me that many organizations are going to have very similar needs in terms of kinds of applications. Can we build a library of OpenSocial applications that have open source licenses? Anyone interested? Maybe this is the use for opensocialorg.org! :-)
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hmmm, I am not sure that open source opensocial applicaions would matter so much.
What really matters is an open social network, built using open protocols and documented, published standards. The ability to be able to move my social network around wherever on the Internet I want to go is important.
Which implies that I want to host it (or delegate the hosting elsewhere), and control access to it. And fine grained access control to what data goes through to which other individuals.
Data silos are bad, as mentioned in the quote on Beth’s blog. And in this case, the value is in the data, not in the source of the application(s) using it.
I totally, completely agree – as I’ve said lots of times. My point here was completely pragmatic – if nonprofits have decided to take the OpenSocial plunge, why not share what they’ve done, and collaborate so that many more can benefit.
That was all. Ultimately, OpenSocial doesn’t do what I’d like it to do.