Although we can’t see it yet, Google’s OpenSocial API is already available to some parnters - Orkut, Ning, Plaxo, XING, hi5, Friendster - and they have been hard at work to implement it as soon as possible.
Plaxo, online calendar and address book, has the honor of being the first to implement OpenSocial into a service and go live with it. It’s implemented in Plaxo Pulse, a service that lets you see social networking activities of people in your address book, like changes in their profiles, new Flickr photos they’ve added, etc.
What does this mean in practice for Plaxo Pulse users? Well, users can now add gadgets to their Pulse profiles, each of which gets a full canvas page inside Pulse. Gadget preferences are stored, and gadgets can create activity streams which will show up in Pulse. Just like with normal Pulse feed items, you can comment on each activity generated by the gadgets. Profile and contact info for the profile and friends-list APIs is also supported. Also, Pulse users know you can have several personal profiles; professional, personal, family, etc. If you add gadgets to any of those profiles, they will also be shown separately.
Of course, bear in mind that OpenSocial is obviously not finished yet; the folks at Plaxo say that the APIs are at version 0.5 and are changing daily. Therefore, expect bugs. Furthermore, only specific apps from some known developers are currently white listed to work with Plaxo Pulse.
All this is just an incredibly small piece of what can be done with OpenSocial. Still, if this enthusiasm by Plaxo to be the first to implement OpenSocial API is any indication, OpenSocial will be a huge success. Let’s face it: every company that ever felt threatened by Facebook (and in the social networking world, that’s all of them) will probably leap head over heels to turn OpenSocial to their advantage. Interesting times are ahead in the land of social networking, no doubt.
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