AOL Hops On To OpenSocial Bandwagon
“Balance shifts as one more internet titan signs on to the Google-waged set of social networking developer tools.”
London – It seems that Time Warner-owned AOL has finally decided to become the latest online group to throw its support behind OpenSocial, the Google-led initiative that plans to make it easier to develop applications for social media websites.
The declaration was made on Wednesday, at the Google I/O conference, during the speech of Google Director of Engineering David Glazer. Altogether, the announcement did not come as a surprise, as AOL’s Bebo, the social network which it acquired in March, already supported the OpenSocial standard.
Now that it has jumped onto the social networking space, AOL will now have a barrage of whole new crop of third-party applications to manage. AOL said it plans to support OpenSocial, beginning with the adoption of Google Gadgets on myAOL.com, which will allow users to add the web-based applications to myAOL pages.
AOL will now join the industry’s every big player in online media such as: MySpace and Yahoo, for example, were foremost followers when Google spun OpenSocial off into its own nonprofit organization.
Eric Staats, principal software engineer for AOL, said: “Over the next few months, we will implement the Gadget specification on myAOL, and eventually we will support OpenSocial across our products and platforms.”
OpenSocial was initially announced by Google in October in response to the whole host of already existing networks and future strategies presented by independent social network-oriented companies, which were planning to develop platforms similar to that of Facebook.
Even so, AOL’s support of the standard promotes the perception of an isolated Facebook as the lone OpenSocial holdout among the heavy hitters of the social Web.
OpenSocial is preferred to be an alternative to the currently extremely fragmented online scenery and is trying to connect all the relevant entities. Major online presences such as Linkedln, Orkut, Hi5, Bebo and Plaxo, as well as several smaller networks have also agreed to be part of the project.
“Facebook, though, is planning to open-source its own developer platform, but has continued to resist the standard.”
Thus far, openness and interoperability have appeared as a strange battleground on the social Web, with all the major players making increasing overtures to the developer community.
Though seriously, Facebook, MySpace and Google have each recently made announcements regarding data portability, aimed at breaking down the barriers between social destinations on the Web by allowing members to carry their profile information from one site to another.
For AOL, the move is logical with its companywide task of opening all its products to developers. AOL has recently opened its AIM instant messaging client and Call Out Internet phone product to third-party development.
“By employing this single widget application framework, AOL will take a significant step toward becoming a more open service, making it easier for developers to leverage our APIs to enhance AOL products and services with creative new applications,” Staats wrote in the OpenSocial blog.