Google Rolls Out Open Social

Google plans a press event today to announce the formation of an alliance of social networks and application developers called Open Social. In a nutshell, sites like Ning, Orkut and LinkedIn will become Open Social "containers" , and application developers like iLike, Slide, Frixter and RockYou will be building Open Social "apps" to run in those containers.

In recent months there's been a lot of attention on Facebook apps, which allows developers to produce widgets that are available to any Facebook user. There are several thousand apps so far, but simple examples would be an app to share Flickr photos or your Twitter feed in your Facebook profile. Open Social takes the same concept and makes it available via API to any network or developer, whereas Facebook is a closed and proprietary platform.

Opinions vary on whether this is a serious threat to Facebook. Mostly it seems to signal a new chapter in the proliferation of ways to bring social aspects to a web presence. Some much smarter people than me have weighed in:

Marc Andreessen, founder of Ning explains it in Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web.

The New York Times: Google and Friends Gang Up on Facebook

TechCrunch: Details Revealed: Google OpenSocial To Launch Thursday

Marc Andreessen has followed up with this short video that helps explain the concept of Open Social:

Find more screencasts like this on Ning Network Creators