

Google Gives Up On “Open Social” Idea, Closes API - creativityland
http://marketingland.com/google-gives-up-open-social-api-3982

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mrstew
TL;DR it hasn't, Danny Sullivan is a bit confused.

They're shutting down the (cool but forgotten & neglected) Social Graph API
that Brad Fitzpatrick created when he moved over to Google. It has the word
"social" in its name, I guess.

That said it wouldn't be completely unexpected if they dropped OpenSocial from
my.google.com. What do the Google+ games use?

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sullivandanny
It's possible. I did try to make it clear that the Social Graph API isn't the
same as OpenSocial. But since OpenSocial is all about an open API for sharing
social data....

Google gave me a statement saying they are separate things, which I added, but
it still wasn't clear how this may or may not be impacting OpenSocial. So, I
asked again.

It's been two hours now, so if it was a crystal clear answer, I'd have
expected to heard. My guess is that they are more interrelated, but as I said,
hope to get more clarification.

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Stratoscope
Two hours, eh? Maybe they were hoping you would skim through the API docs...

Social Graph API: <http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/docs/api.html>

OpenSocial FAQ: <http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/faq.html>

OpenSocial Specs: <http://docs.opensocial.org/display/OSD/Specs>

Snark aside, OpenSocial is a gadget and container specification built around
the Google Gadgets spec. The Social Graph API is a service to let you query
information about connections between web pages.

I've written some Google Gadgets (OpenSocial apps) and took a quick look
through the Social Graph API spec (a much simpler spec). I sure don't see any
connection between them. What's the connection that you see?

~~~
sullivandanny
I've corrected the story with a new headline and lead. OpenSocial is
continuing.

Two hours is an incredibly long time for Google to respond to something like
that, where there's story out in error. It's a long time to respond period. I
know, because I'm in contact with them all the time. That's typically a sign
they don't quite know what to say.

Clearly, that wasn't the case here. I did look at the OpenSocial site, and a
few of the pages within it. There did seem to be a possible connection between
the two. Despite my initial language that did qualify things, it was still too
strong.

Excuses aside, and as Kevin Marks notes elsewhere in comments here, the
OpenSocial idea was initially put out there as some type of way that Google
would unite the web to help share social information for developers to use --
to pull in profile info, friend info and activities. And it wasn't positioned
as just some type of social gadget building tool.

That's what it seems to have devolved into. Just curious from anyone, is
Google feeding Google+ information into OpenSocial?

The connection I was seeing was now that Google has its own social network,
and its own set of social signals, it seemed less interested in potentially
ensuring there was an ecosystem of sharing everyone's social signals out
there.

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Kevin_Marks
the old social search that actually crawled the web used the information from
the Social Graph API - see what it has for you here:

<http://www.google.com/s2/search/social>

Looks like this is Google betting purely on an owned graph via Google+

