Who would have thought that sitting in front of your computer would become more social of an activity than visiting your friends on the weekend? With the increasingly popular social Web 2.0 applications, Google has foreseen the need to accomodate developers with their OpenSocial API.Open who?
OpenSocial is essentially an abstract layer that allows developers of Web sites to create a standardized API that other OpenSocial users will be familiar with. Right now if you wanted to develop apps for a site, you would have to use the specific Flickr API, Facebook API, Twitter API, and so on for every site you wanted to use. Now with the OpenSocial API, you will be able to retrieve and update data from all of the sites that support it. Currently there are only a handful as it is a new product, but in time you will be able to draw whatever data you want using the same functions and the same API.

Who is using it?
According to Google’s site: “There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING”. I imagine this is only going to grow exponentially as more sites notice an increase in the number of developers using the API for their modules. There is a debate over whether or not the OpenSocial platform will become more popular than the current Facebook platform. 20bits.com has a great article covering some thoughts on this as well as the weight of success of OpenSocial being based on it’s distribution.

How is it used?
The OpenSocial API is based entirely upon JavaScript and HTML. Using the API you make asynchronous calls to whichever site you would like to retrieve or update data from, and the response is returned to you as an object which you are then able to format and output to the DOM. There are a few API’s that you can incorporate depending on your purpose:

• People and Friends data API which allowsyou to retrieve and update Friends lists and People-related data.
• Activities data API for user-based actions (think the Facebook feed or Twitter-esque “what I’m doing now” actions).
• Persistent data API allowing you to view and update global application data, domain feeds, and other key/value pairs.

Note that even though the API is based on JavaScript and HTML, the site that provides the back-end for the API will obviously be using other languages such as PHP, .NET, Coldfusion, etc.

Will it be a success?
Nobody can know for sure, but its popularity depends on the developing community using it, and third party sites supporting it. My only concern is that as social applications become increasingly more in-depth the ability for the API to support it may be limited. The generalized People/Acitivites/Feeds appears to encompass all current social apps, however down the road who knows what new sites will be doing to make our digital lives more “friendly”. The most comforting aspect however is that Google is developing the API, which means they have some of the best developers working on it. Plus I doubt Google is going to be going away any time soon.