A little over a month ago OpenSocial was hailed as “checkmate” and mesmerized the blogosphere. Now, the chorus of Kumbaya has been replaced by the cacophony of competition. As I argued earlier, OpenSocial was a game plan we’ve seen before, just not a particularly successful one. It transpires that:
- The OpenSocial spec remains incomplete and has been described as “half-baked“.
- Erstwhile supporters are scattering to offer their own widget platforms (LinkedIn, Friendster) and even choosing to clone Facebook’s platform instead (Bebo).
- Facebook is embracing Bebo’s cloning and offering to license their platform broadly (nice move Ami).
- Some like LinkedIn are returning to the much more interesting problem of programmatically opening up the “social graph” as opposed to the distraction of just trying to create a least common denominator widget container.
Despite my old buddy Vic’s pioneering use of a large wooden stump in the cause of developer evangelism, OpenSocial is much closer to being checkmated than doing any checkmating itself.