Here Comes OpenSocial

The trend was looking like:

- Every year many new social networks arrive
- Every year a new king is crowned
- App providers needed to constantly rewrite their apps for each network

Google have cleverly created a system for themselves that social networks can also use - a standard framework - and they already have Orkut, LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo, Salesforce and Ning - collectively they have 100 million users, double the users of Facebook. MySpace is also not involved at this stage, but you could expect that all new networks will embrace OpenSocial.

I'm guessing that the networking site itself writes apps that form the personality/look/feel of the site, and that slots into the same framework.

If this means that joining a new site is easier because you can import your data into it with a single click, it will be a big success.

And don't be surprised if Google do someting similar for virtual worlds - they make the framework, businesses create the worlds, users can shift their avatar & data from one world to another with ease