I’m thinking of calling my open services work ‘principled services’ going forward to split some of the difference between open and Free, and remove some of the ambiguity around the often-overloaded terms ‘open and ‘free’. In the meantime, we’re about to get a flood of discussion of open services, courtesy of Open Social, the new Google project.
I’m mocking them, a little bit, but it bears watching. The really interesting question, which I don’t see fully answered yet, is whether or not this is just about widgets/developer platform, or if this is about the broader (and much more important) open social graph. (Unfortunately, the news suggests the former.) Depending on the final form and how much control it gives to Google, it would almost certainly be better from an open/free/principled perspective than Facebook/Myspace. I look forward to seeing if/how mugshot will integrate.
Technorati search of the news; the actual press release1; Techcrunch.
(Tangentially, I’m irritated that orkut doesn’t seem to let me integrate my old orkut account with my google account.)
- best press release ever- search for XXXX and Website Partner A [↩]
I let Google delete my Orkut account after obtaining a Google account was required to keep it. So do you have two Google accounts, one of which is only associated with Orkut and you’re annoyed you can’t merge the two?
honestly not sure; it is possible the old account was deleted; I certainly can’t find it anymore.