The Daily Forex

You are at the center of your own Web: What Google’s new Open Social means for you and me

Social networks boomed when kids — who have always called the friends they’ve just left at school as soon as they got home — moved to Web networks such as MySpace to stay in constant contact with all their friends at once. They establish their own profile pages and plaster them with links to what they like — their favorite people and music and books and TV, games to play, maps of where they’ve been, poll and surveys and sometimes even news headlines.

Adults, who often center more on the families we’ve built and live with, were late to this party, sidling in through professional networks such as LinkedIn before flooding into Facebook, which began as a college students-only hangout, but eventually had to include those who’d graduated, then anybody.

What’s important here is that social networking puts each of us at the very center of our own Web, surrounded by links we care about.

Google this week launched some free tools anyone can use to center that Web wherever we want it to be, not just inside Facebook or MySpace, and to expand the range of programs and information we nestle with.

Marc Andreesen — co-author of the original Netscape browser, now co-founder of the free Ning, where you can create your own free niche social network — explains Google’s new Open Social platform (Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web):

Open Social takes the Facebook platform concept and provides an open standard approach that can be used by the entire web. Open Social is an open way for everyone to do what Facebook has done… Open Social’s API is based entirely on Javascript. If you know HTML and Javascript today, you will be able to immediately use Open Social to turn your web applications and web sites into Open Social apps.

What’s a platform? A place to launch software. Windows is a platform, but so is the Web now — Google maps, Flickr, all these “Web services” run on a Web platform, using Web “APIs.”

What’s an API? Wikipedia: An application programming interface (API) is a source code interface that an operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by computer programs.

What does that mean? It means you can use programs without having to know how to write them. The best-known example may be map builders. You use Google maps and add your own markers, then put the map on your own site. You’ve used the Google Maps API to put your data on Google’s maps, and it connects back to Google to display the satellite views, etc. Without the API, you’d make the map on Google, then have to turn it into a photo — no clicking or zooming, no switching from satellite to map view, no sliding east or west to check out the neighborhood.

What’s a Facebook app? Display a slideshow, search for jobs, see your stock quotes, play games, share your iPod playlist, read news, vote for your favorite Jimi Hendrix song, all from a little box on your own Facebook page.

But Facebook is a closed “city.” If you click on a link to a Facebook page, it will lead to a “Join Facebook” page. You can’t view anything there without becoming a member — just like the original AOL, but free. But because Facebook is so big, developers have been learning new formats and writing little programs that work only inside Facebook.

Google’s Open Social API lets anyone make little programs that will work on any social network or your own Web pages, not just inside Facebook.

Make once, place everywhere: In earlier versions of projo.com, we used “server-side includes” on a lot of pages. That’s an obscure name for a bit of text or links we wanted to put on a lot of pages, and would probably be updating. Instead of copying the code to every page — and opening every page when we wanted to update the links — we just made one little page once, and “included” a link to it on every page. When we updated the “include,” it would change on every page that called it in automatically.

We still use some “includes” — the latest headlines, for each blog, for instance, are all on projo.com/blogs and selected ones are sprinkled on the homepage, sports and lifestyles pages. A server-side include displays its contents on pages on the same Web server. It doesn’t work anywhere else.

Open Social’s widgets — it can be the programs, headline feeds, games I mentioned above — can be placed all over the Web and inside networks and pages that support it. I could put it on this blog and on my profile page on all the networks I’ve joined.

Except — for now anyway — Facebook itself, which has a “closed” API — code for apps that run there only works inside its walled city. Don’t be too surprised if they give up on making everybody make two versions of cool programs, one for them and one for the rest of the Web. (Yes, Facebook breaks the Web. Boo, hiss.) TechCrunch says Google and Facebook are talking to each other already.

Google notes,

There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

Six Apart makes Movable Type, this blog’s software (which is itself preparing an open-source version that anyone can customize, due by year’s end), so I expect to be playing with this. I know html, and a little Javascript. If I teach myself a little more, I could write Open Social apps and try them out here.

Google’s OpenSocial API Blog launched today.

From Google’s Open Social FAQ:

How do I create social apps using OpenSocial?
Social apps are initially created in the same manner as Google Gadgets: with your favorite text editor or within the Google Gadget Editor. They then can be augmented with the OpenSocial JavaScript APIs, where they can fetch and post social data about friends and activities.

And,

Google’s gadget caching technology can ease your bandwidth demands should your app suddenly become a worldwide success.

Frankly, many Facebooks apps are a way to move the core functionality of a Web site onto a convenient spot on your own page, relieving you of the need to click a bookmark and letting you share the data. Many are frivolous, a developer playing with the code without really thinking about how useful or compelling the functionality or content is for the user.

Better ideas now have a way to become real anywhere.

What does it mean for a news site such as projo.com? We have a lot of trouble showing you all the news we gather. The Web site uses pages and menus and we hope you’ll click your way through them all to see what you want.

But you have to remember to come to the site, or to open your feed reader if you’ve subscribed to our blogs’ RSS feeds.

We could make “rivers of news” you could put right on your own page. Stories that published to an inside index would appear wherever you are as we publish them. You decide which stories you want to read, not editors pushing some to the front page and leaving others to be “discovered.”

And that’s just the first, most obvious application.