Battle Lines Being Drawn Over OpenSocial

SkiifGeek writes "Microsoft employees have already openly criticized Google's OpenSocial initiative (recently discussed here), and now there's news that one of the first OpenSocial applications, emote by Plaxo, was hacked within 45 minutes of appearing on the Net (it was subsequently pulled while Plaxo looked into fixing the holes). Although coding errors can happen to anyone, leaving evidence of lax programming discipline when all it takes to view your code is 'View Source' is poor form. It seems that the battle lines have been drawn between Microsoft and Google through their social networking proxies, with Facebook getting ready to fire the next salvo in the social networking battle."

Comments

OpenSocial is fixing a solved problem!

[Saint Aardvark]

Chromatic points out that the whole problem addressed by Ope\ nSocial's API has already been solved:

Over the weekend I encountered a dusty old RFC written in 1982 that might solve this persnickety interoperability problem. Jon Posten's Social Messaging Transport Protocol describes a system that relies on the combination of your unique identifier (username) on a social networking site with a unique identifier (domain name) for such site to produce an Internet-wide addressible identifier uniquely identifying, well, you. Given this unique identifier, any conformant messaging system can use this Messaging protocol to send you, well, a message.

Honestly, I can't understand why Google et al. would ignore this work. If only there were some way of contacting them...