Marketing APIs continued…
In the unlikely event that I haven’t already pounded this one to death, I remember now when I originally thought of this idea back in November. I wrote then that Open Social seemed to me to be the first step towards a marketing description language.
I thought I’d check in on the status with Open Social and so browsed over to the discussion board. It was quite interesting to look at the progress (or in many cases lack of progress) that’s actually being made.
While Google’s Orkut social network seems to have a fairly robust discussion around actual real technical implementation issues, the discussions around most of the other networks are very limited. In the case of MySpace, there still is no sign of a sandbox for developers, which essentially means that Open Social applications on MySpace are still vaporware and a long way from being realized. While MySpace had previously announced a separate development platform, I can’t find any information on the progress of that either.
On one hand, slow progress is to be expected. The promise of Open Social is quite large and simply announcing a commitment to Open Social is a long way from actually realizing it, however the lack of any apparent progress with one of the largest platforms (MySpace) is a little troubling. And, there’s also been very little mention of progress on Linkedin, other than a posting on their blog.
I suppose the question is: was the coalition that Open Social brought together actually committed to delivering an open platform to serve customers or did it simply make for good blog copy? I’m honestly in two minds on this one. I’d love to believe that it’s a sincere initiative but it does seem that the software industry’s response to problems is to announce new standards which ultimately don’t (for one reason or another) deliver on promises.
The latest version of this is the data portability workgroup. It would be nice to view this optimistically too, but I agree with Wired, it sounds like more talk than action to me too.