Three Minutes With Google's OpenSocial Director

Shindig's mission is to make it really easy to implement OpenSocial support on your site. The goal is that your development team takes Shindig and has a proof of concept up and running in hours, not months. Shindig is making great strides in that direction. There are big pieces of the spec now that are plug-it-in-and-run, and that'll be ongoing.

There's no requirement that somebody uses Shindig to implement OpenSocial. The API can be implemented in many different ways, and Shindig is one easy way to do so.

:   How much liberty will Google give the participating Web sites to add extensions to their OpenSocial implementations?

The short answer is: no gratuitous differences. That means it's essential that everyone implementing OpenSocial be able to extend it to take advantage of their site's unique capabilities. It's also essential that if I'm a developer building an application that does the same thing on three different sites, I should do it the same way.

So we're working hard with [Web site partners] to say: where you support something for which there's a standard mechanism, use the standard mechanism. Where you want to support something that isn't part of the standard, please do so and here's a standard extension mechanism that we built in so you can easily add your unique capabilities in a discoverable and testable way by developers.

: Is there an OpenSocial certification, so that if a Web site partner strays too far with its extensions, Google can force them to scale things back or else lose the seal?

We've asked ourselves that, but so far, our interests are so aligned that we haven't come close to having to do anything that black-and-white. The people that [such a problem] will hurt first and most are application developers, and they will raise an outcry and we'll say: "Ok, what can we jointly do to bring a little bit of order back to this world?" But so far that hasn't been a concern.

: Some complain OpenSocial aims to be such a baseline standard that it will only allow developers to write simple widgets and gadgets.

There is some confusion about what piece of the problem OpenSocial is trying to solve. Also, there's a false reasoning that what I see today is all I will ever see.

First, the word "gadget" has a bunch of connotations, not all accurate. One is that it's something 100-by-200 pixels in a little box on a page. There are implementations of gadgets like that out there, but that's not true for how OpenSocial supports application builders. OpenSocial has built into it the concept of "views" which lets you say: "Here's how my application looks if you give me a little rectangle and if you give me a full page, and here's how I can navigate between different views of my application."

The second thing is OpenSocial isn't trying to boil the ocean. Our overall goal is to help the Web become more social more quickly. There's a whole bunch of things we can do to help the Web become more social, and OpenSocial was the first and biggest place where we saw an opportunity. OpenSocial isn't meant to be a panacea, nor to do everything for everyone. It's meant to move the world forward and to solve a very specific problem: help developers build an application that can run on any social site that wants to support OpenSocial.

At the same time, the proof is going to be the application, and if it turns out this round of OpenSocial provides good applications and we want to get to stellar applications, we'll enhance it.