Google today launched the OpenSocial platform for building application across social networking sites. The website is now live, check this out: http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

OpenSocial is now live for orkut, their social networking platform. Apart from having “Many sites, one API” approach as mentioned on OpenSocial website, what also makes it unique is the ability to write multi-page applications without having any server support.

OpenSocial is built upon Google Gadget technology, so you can build a great, viral social app with little to no serving costs. With the Google Gadget Editor and a simple key/value API, you can build a complete social app with no server at all….

How do developers use this API
OpenSocial provides APIs to access People Data, Activities Data and Persistence Data (to store map based data pertaining to the users of the application). The interface is javascript based, though it’s possible to call the endpoints using Rest directly. Detailed API reference may be found here.

How do Social networking sites make themselves OpenSocial compliant

In order for the social networking sites to host the OpenSocial applications, they would need to support/implement the SPI (service provider interface) side of OpenSocial API. They can either connect to their own data or possibly to another social networking site!

How does it impact current social app scenario

If this platform picks up, it will make lives easier for those developing social network applications since they would be able to access social graph data in a standard way and there would be no need to have an application for Facebook, one for Orkut, one for MySpace and so on.

One more thing to notice is that the framework allows different social networking sites to talk to each other - something we haven’t seen happening so far (I am not too sure if we see a lot of that happening, but great idea in any case).

How does it affect Facebook

So the big question - will Facebook (have to) embrace OpenSocial? At this time, it’s anybody’s guess but the initial indications suggest they might as well do that! This development will sure take the spotlight away from Facebook to Google and other OpenSource participats in the near future.

Overall, OpenSocial should bring some order to the chaos around social application development. As mentioned in a previous post, we should expect to hear more from Google on the social networking front over the next few weeks/months!