Google OpenSocial APIs not ready for the dance

On November 1, Google laid out the plan for OpenSocial APIs, which will allow applications to tap into the "graphs" of different social networks (Orkut, Ning, MySpace, etc.) without modification, reaching about 200 million users. Facebook hasn't endorsed the APIs, but apparently there is no big hurry. The reference implementation of OpenSocial APIs is currently version 0.5 and version 0.6 isn't due until just before the holidays.

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch quotes Russ Whitman, the founder of MediaPops, about the state of OpenSocial APIs:

Its clear we are pre-Beta at this point, with Google telling developers they are hoping to launch 1.0 early next year. Any company hoping to leverage Open Social as a means to grow its user base similarly to the Facebook growth model will need to wait at least until February to get started, if its ready then. In the end my hope is that Open Social becomes more than just hype to compete with Facebook.

Arne Roomann-Kurrik of Google posted about issues with OpenSocial in a Google Group. He estimated that the API would be available in January, which was what Joe Kraus, director of product development, told me last month. Following are the priorities:

Priorities [Updated 11/30/2007] What is being worked on right now? Our highest priority features include:

• Secure phone home - Ability to communicate trusted information to third party servers from your gadget.
• Navigation - Functions to facilitate navigating between profile and canvas, as well as standardized means of passing custom parameters to your application.
• Profiles - Standardizing the data that is available across all containers.
• Access Control Lists - Clarify the policy for access to application data.
• JSON support - Standard JSON serialization to/from JSON for AppData - no more importing third party libraries for this task.

Some other features we're working on:

• Packaging and capabilities interrogation - Determine what features a container supports.
• UI Libraries - Allow containers to supply standard UI (buttons, tabs, etc).
• More AppData types - Allow writing numbers, dates in standard formats.
• More options for viral spread - For example, "requestInviteFriends", "requestInstallApp".