Will Nature Network join to the Google Gang to use Open Social?
Posted by attilachordash on October 31, 2007
Google will launch this Thursday a new project, called Open Social, a set of software tools for developers to create applications for multiple social networking sites. The standards are accepted so far by Hi5, Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, Ning, Salesforce.com, and Oracle, and not accepted by MySpace and obviously Facebook (the whole project could be interpreted as a gigantic anti-Facebook move or positively as a revolutionary pass over Web 2.0 step).
My question for today concerning the scientific web community: Will Nature Network accept to use Open Social and when? With the focusing on the most common usages Open Social apps are open to cover the general activities of scientists joining to any network, while specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs.
According to Techcrunch: OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:
- Profile Information (user data)
- Friends Information (social graph)
- Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)
Links:
Google rushes to open itself up
Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook
P.S. I wonder what effect Open Social will have on the identity and uniqueness of different social networking sites?
Deepak said
I believe they should. Nature Network has some flaws, mostly around design, but opening up the Network to work with the Google APIs might be an excellent idea.
annplugged said
I agree: the more nodes in your network, the more flexibility, the more immediacy the better. Anyway, how is Nature natwork developing? Do you use it guys? Any buzz around it? (joining Open Social would surely bring some PR, and would already have done so had they been in Techcrunch in time. What happened? SciFoo shows that they are in good working relations, so why wasn’t Nature an input partner?)
Deepak said
Nature Network’s design is not quite appropriate for joining opensocial at this time. IMO, it’s going to need a bit of a re-design to facilitate community. It’s still got a very web 1.0 feel to it. That said, I do show up there everyday just to see what’s going on
Euan said
Annplugged: Google is a big place and Nature’s social networking efforts are (relatively) small, I think is the answer.
I agree with Deepak saying we couldn’t just plug OpenSocial straight in. ATM I don’t think that the cost / benefit is particularly clear cut, either – it’s cool, but would it make more scientists sign up? Perhaps once there are some killer apps out there.
(that’s not an official NPG position, I’m not a publisher and I don’t work on Network directly)
That’s not to say that we aren’t opening up our social apps in other ways, though. You should always have control over your own data…