With all the media buzz surrounding Google’s revelation that it has been collaborating with MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Ning, and other social networks to come up with an Open Social — an API that will allow developers to create programs that will work across supporting social networks, a lot of baseless comments and even full length articles are popping up from very reputable sites that this is Google (and MySpace’s) “answer” to the Microsoft and Facebook tie-up.

A quick search on Digg and Techmeme brings up some interesting results, such as:

To me, this knee-jerk reaction is nothing but a way to gain attention and capitalize on Microsoft stigma.
So Microsoft did make a huge investment in FaceBook, but to Microsoft it was an advertising deal and nothing more. There is nothing to stop Google from purchasing FaceBook shares once it goes public (and I assure you the moment it gains traction that it will).

There is nothing to stop FaceBook from adapting the Open Social initiative. This is assuming the API will also allow developers of social networking sites to implement the open social initiative.

More importantly, FaceBook has not made any deals that will stop them from joining the Open Social initiative, and there is absolutely no reason for Google not bring them in. So even if Open Social can only be adapted by sites that have signed into the initiative, all FaceBook needs to do is join, and Google should be more than happy to have them in.

Sure, this could mean rewriting parts of the Facebook API, but it’s not that hard to do. All Facebook needs to do is write a wrapper or an extension that will support Open Social’s standards. The whole point of Open Social anyway is that it should be easy to implement on any programming language, so all the bases pretty much covered.

Finally, not much has been revealed yet about what Open Social can or cannot do. The OpenID initiative aimed to resolve account management issues. However, adoption rate has been very slow and has mostly been ignored by the key social networks. Will Open Social have an account management system that will centralize our login names and passwords, similar to OpenID? Will it have a centralized profile management to store our name, birth date, and address? Can users set a universal profile photo, just like Gravatar? Will it keep peering and relationship data, allowing us to have the same network of friends on, say, MySpace, Friendster, and LinkedIn? These are just some of the ideas that I have come up with, and most it sounds like a dream. While I hope Open Social is the answer to all of the above, the reality is probably that Open Social is much simpler than it actually sounds.

At the end of the day the clear winner here is us, developers and end-users. With all the social networking sites that I have accounts on I have always dreamed of some centralized method of managing my data, and Open Social may just be the right tool to achieve this.

Related links:

• Facebook opens its API to developers
• When interviewed about the Microsoft and FaceBook deal, Sergey Brin replies: ‘We don’t need to own everything…’
• My take on the 15B valuation placed on Microsoft’s Facebook deal
• Details of the Microsoft and FaceBook deal

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