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...

I hope this isn't taken seriously...

[east coast]

Who the hell really cares what way the social net wars go? Maybe if you're an active developer I can see it but otherwise it's like arguing over superman versus batman.

This kind of bickering will hopefully turn some people against social networks and get some kids back to doing their own pages again instead of using lame ass templates.

Re:OpenSocial isn't going to save MySpace.

[s1d]

Hmm. This is beyond Facebook vs Myspace.
All Facebook fanboys seem to forget that its only big in US, and there too not the biggest yet (may get there, but who's seen the future!). For people in India, where I'm from, Orkut is the default social network. Everybody's there. 10 year old kids, 60 year old grand dads, but not to forget, India's teeming youth. Almost everyone from my school, university, work etc. Everyone! OpenSocial wasn't built to save Myspace. It was built to serve as a common API to developers to develop apps for all social network.
Apps on Facebook are very cool, but with the barrage of apps which have come up, it has totally screwed up their UI. It takes a newcomer a little while to find his bearings there. And even for experienced users, the app spam is becoming too much. Then you have profiles where a user has added dozens of apps, making it pretty much like a highly jumbled up myspace page, though without the graphic stuff.
Facebook has been going great guns so far, but they now have a very credible opponent. And it shall make for very interesting following.
As a passing note, check out this community for opensocial developers/users.
http://www.opensocializr.com/