While I like the direction of Google OpenSocial, not only may Google be too late, as Mark argues, I don't think they go far enough. A framework and a set of Google Gadgets for building "social applications" misses the point. We don't want to build more applications that look like Facebook applications. It isn't about a social UI. It's about deeper re-use of social data to enliven any application. Some of those applications may have a minimal UI, like Google's breakthrough search app. OpenSocial doesn't give us any of that. Ajax widgets are a halfway house, an attempt to sandbox the kinds of applications that can be created. And that will be the downfall of OpenSocial. If all you can build are Facebook-like applications, Facebook wins.

We all want what Mark describes: a definitive place under our own control where we can describe who we are and what we care about so that applications can use that data to provide us with smarter services. We don't really care whether that repository is at Facebook or Google or any other site, or perhaps even if it's an aggregation of data from many places, but we do want it to become more useful to us. Not just more useful to the holder of our profile, but to every site we touch on the internet. Whichever company gets there first, to a truly open, user-empowering, internet-turbocharging social network platform, is going to be the net's next big winner.

I couldn't agree more.

I want to sign up for a social networking account someplace and just have it suck in all my information. (And I'm pretty hellbent on me hosting all my stuff, I don't place much faith in a third-party service for photos, email, blogging, etc.)

So, we now have Google's answer to Facebook's closed development platform: OpenSocial (link goes live Thursday).

Google has a good selection of launch partners for this -- Ning, LinkedIn (an API?! finally!), and Plaxo being the most interesting ones. RockYou and Slide are Facebook development companies that are also signed on, so we'll definitely see some launch apps, not just bare APIs.

This is, of course, very encouraging and similar to the short discussion I lead at the Facebook Developer Garage: integrate with systems other than Facebook, use open standards, and put your stuff out on the open web. Marc Canter has a gleeful post about all of this, including linking back to standards and experiments that have already been underway. Be interesting to see how OpenID Attribute Exchange, which I have long been a fan of, fits into all this.

Previously, Microformats Applied To Various Social Networking Hubs.