The overload of online social networks: part II

Since my last post on social networks overload a lot of things have happened. Some more insightful, some more trendy. Nonetheless, the world has kept spinning.

First, a lot has already been said about one of the newest Google initiatives (no, not Android - that'll be a theme for another post), OpenSocial.

In a nutshell, OpenSocial (from Google's own words) provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds.

When launched on November 1st, Google's press release already included an impressive list of companies/websites that provide (or are in the process of providing) support for the OpenSocial API, such as MySpace, orkut (obviously), hi5, Oracle, Salesforce.com, NY Times, and PayPal. That is really impressive.

My opinion: this most probably means that social networks will become open (do you hear that, Facebook?), third-party developers will simply focus on providing the best experience to users for their products, instead of focusing on a bunch of APIs with bad documentation. But the best part is the easyness of importing and exporting my own data, user info, photos, friends network, etc. across different social networking websites. About time....

On a more conceptual side, and with a smaller impact (when comparing to Google's), but still of the utmost importance, is a breakfast-fueled rant by Tim Berners-Lee.

Tim talks about The Graph. The social network graph, as a particular case of the Semantic Web, advocating it as another way to bootstrap, access, and explore social networks independently from any website (using FOAF, by the way).

Lastly, discussions are popping up with similar thoughts like mine's, already proposing some solutions to this problem (despite being more or less architectural/conceptual).

I think that the social networking revolution is just beginning. I wonder when will they start taking into account the always increasing number of Web Interaction Environments to provide the best user (and social) experience to everyone, everywhere. Has anyone tested social network websites with any disabled person? I wonder what would've happen...