Google’s Gadget Ploy: The Web, Owned by GOOG
“Where the hell is the container API?” Good Google OpenSocial question! Given that Marc Andreessen has been cheerleading all week long for his $44 million VC backed Ning as a “social networking container” for the Google anti-Facebook play, well before it was announced, by Google.
As I have oft said, Google’s secret weapon is a four-letter word: SPIN! The Google spin machine has been in social over drive to bring us their shrewdly labled Mark Zuckerberg antidote: OpenSocial.
Despite Googley lore, the real Google mission is to control the world’s information in order to to sell ads against everyone else’s data, rather than to organize the content of others to render it “useful.” Similarly, the real Google OpenSocial goal is to create a Web programmed by Google, rather than a more open, social one.
“OpenSocial makes the Web better,” the “Official” Google blog declares, because “as the Web goes, so goes Google.” YAY?
While Google OpenSocial PR ptiches wax poetic about “openness,” the real code world for Google’s OpenSocial lays the Google cards on the Web table Google is setting for itself: How does one go about “hostiing OpenSocial apps? By hosting Gadgets, Google Gadgets!
Google OpenSocial could more aptly be called the Google Gadget Platform! In Google’s own not so open words:
HOSTING GOOGLE OPEN SOCIAL APPS
Your website can host third party OpenSocial apps integrated with your site’s social network. There are 2 steps to doing so — become a gadget container, and implement the OpenSocial Service Provider Interface (SPI).HOSTING GOOGLE GADGETS
OpenSocial apps typically include Google Gadgets, so you will need to provide a way to allow a user to add gadgets to their page. You can provide your own directory, link to hand-picked URLs, and/or allow users to add gadgets by URL. Gadgets are typically implemented as individual iframes within your containing page. More information on being a gadget container is available in the Google Gadets docs.
Russel Beattie on the Google pre-announcement OpenSocial maneuvers:
Would people be jumping on this bandwagon so readily if it was Microsoft unilaterally coming up with an API, holding secret meetings geared towards undercutting the market leader, and then making sure that only those anointed partners get a head start on launch day by making sure a key part of the API isn’t released - even in alpha. (It obviously exists already, all the partners have that spec and even sample code, I’m sure. The rest of us don’t get access yet, until the GOOG says otherwise).
“The rest of us” also don’t get invited to share in the $200 billion market cap warmth of the Google “campfire!”
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