Digital Media: Austin

Today, Google and many other partners plan to unveil new APIs which allow developers to create applications that will work on any participating social networks. The project is called Open Social and all the techsters are talking about it.

Unlike Facebook, which uses its own markup language (FBML), Open Social utilizes HTML and Javascript to provide an open devlopment API that any developer can program for. As Marc Andreeson, founder of Ning explains, “Open Social basically standardizes the concept of a plug-in API in such a way that neither host social networking environments (containers) nor external applications will ever have to invent another plug-in API, or have to choose between multiple competing proprietary plug-in APIs.”

This will provide much needed scale for developers to deploy applications to many different social networks without the hassle and cost of programming for each one. The less manpower and funds dedicated to “porting” apps to different social network APIs will free up more manpower and funds to dedicate towards new and innovative apps.

I would think the cost incentives alone will push all the app developers to adopt Open Social and once “users” begin to understand that apps can move across their social networks, they will more than likely abandon the walled garden type sites.

Update:

Paid Content reported earlier today that Myspace and Bebo are jumping on board as well.