More Interoperability in Social Networking

I blogged about Interoperability in social networks 3 weeks ago.  A lot has changed in those 3 weeks.  Google is now heading up an initiative called Open Social which provides a common set of API's for developers to create applications and widgets on top of the social graphs of a number of different social networks.

New York Times broke the news first.  VentureBeat's got a good Silicon Valley spin on it.  And Marc Andreessen has some insightful thoughts on opening up.  My friends Andrew Chen and Jeremy Liew also have great thoughts on the subject.  The list of social networks participating is impressive - Bebo, Hi5, Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Plaxo, Xing, Friendster, Six Apart, and... Myspace.  Only Google could have pulled this many players together.

So what does this mean exactly?

As I suggested in my earlier post, this was bound to happen.  What caught some tech folks by surprise was the mass level of buy-in into one standard led by Google.  But this is great news!  From MyChurch.org's perspective, I thought I'd have to take our "My Church" app that we launched on Facebook and individually recreate it on all the different social networks.  But now thanks to Google, I can "write once, run everywhere."  It's an object-oriented programmer's dream come true ;)

No, I mean, what does this mean for non-geeks?

It lets social networking users bring in all sorts of functionality into the profiles and networks they've already built up.  Whether you're on Facebook or Myspace or Friendster, you'll be able to bring in content and data from your other online presences and incorporate it all into the social networking home of your choice.

What does this mean for the church?

Look for developers to create apps that can take your church's events, sermons, or any other content and integrate them into Myspace, Bebo, Hi-5, etc.  We've seen some early adopters do this on Facebook already.  From my (limited) insider info, I know that recreating the already-built Facebook apps onto Open Social is fairly easy.  So look for these same apps to launch on all the other social networks.

What does Joe Suh think it means for the church?

If you were hesitant to jump onto Myspace or Facebook before, I think this is a watershed moment for churches to truly be able to outreach online through the social networks of their congregants.  Keep an eye on this over the next few months.  I've been dreaming about this kind of interoperability for more than a year.  Please get in touch if you're as excited as I am, and want to help build out a "My Church" application on Myspace...

Comments

[Greg Atkinson]

Joe - I'm writing a book called "Church 2.0". I'd love to talk with you more about all this.

[Tim Bednar]

Joe --

I've been going over this too in my head. It is really a lot to wrap your head around. If I have it right, basically any web app or web site can use OpenSocial to both import and export data to the "social graph".

But to take advantage of this, you need to have your site (content) or web app (data) built correctly. Unfortunately, I doubt that many church web sites or web applications are built this way.

This is a development where I do not thing it can be overlooked...