I penned this post on another site back in November, alas I want to continue the thread of this conversation here on The XBroker. Hopefully the big G doesnt penalize me too bad for duplicate content…
Google, the core driver behind SEO strategies, looks to become the King of Social Networking Optimization (SNO) as well.
“The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.
OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.”
‘Learn Once, Write Everywhere’ is the core message of this ‘new’ architecture proposed and fostered by Google. Using the most general of statements, Googles latest release will have broad reaching effects regarding how the web ‘works’.
According to Google, OpenSocial is a set of three types of API’s that allow programmers to access core functions and information that are common to ’social networks’:
- Profile Information. Info about you.
- Friends Information. Info about your friends.
- Activities. Whats everyone doing, reading, buying, looking at, playing with..?
Although the three API’s above look pretty ‘So What-ish…’, thats really the beauty of it all, they’re blatantly vanilla yet almost infinitely scaleable considering the amount, quality, and how information can be shared. There are little to no restrictions from a programmers standpoint, it’s a wide open and flat playing field to develop under.In the real estate and mortgage verticals, today the question is:
‘Whats the big deal?’ since there are no succinct applications or service providers amongst the initial group of partners that clearly look to benefit ‘Real Estate’ or ‘Mortgage’. I’ll reserve specific examples for the next posting, but I do have some general broad canvas thoughts…
In a past post, I spoke of the evolution of Widgetry (or Gadgetry) or, shareable applications designed to increase the functionality and share-ability of a web-site via SNO. I’ve also touched on the importance of SNO.
Google has kept things ‘Really Simple Stupid’, allowing the collective brain power of programmers with almost any skill level to develop an application or widget using OpenSocials API’s. With just a few tweaks as to how applications/widgets are developed, programmers who choose to integrate OpenSocials API’s won’t need to learn or develop new (mark-up) languages to make their shareable wares work on…pick your web-platform…
As stated above, OpenSocial isn’t ‘just another social network’, it creates a common platform that allows independently produced applications/widgets to work on and connect with multiple platforms.
This should allow for very rapid development cycles as well as much faster adoption rates for popular (and useful) applications. If you’ve used FaceBook you have seen the dynamic of rapid application development in action, which is also why Facebook is the rage in IT (and VC) land. OpenSocial one ups Facebook by not restricting such application development to only their platform. Just think, you could soon be able to throw sheep at your peers outside of FaceBook! (OK, bad joke.)
What becomes possible using OpenSocial relevant to Real Estate service providers? Ponder for a second the richness of information that could be called upon, seamed together, and shared between ‘network hubs’, or like groups of professional peers, running relevant applications (widgets et.al.) using OpenSocial’s framework. Listings, potential consumers, existing clients, vendors, mortgage rates, broad demographic data, hyper-local opinions and information…
Today, real estate agents, mortgage professionals, brokerages et. al. are powerful and robust information network hubs, however, they still remain fractured and relatively disparate from each other….Applications designed to seam these hubs together for the benefit of the professional end-user as well as the ever discerning long tail driven consumer are already in the works, OpenSocial looks to have shortened the learning and adoption curve of such applications substantially.
Also See:
Social Networking Maintenance Made Easier
What Does OpenSocial Mean to Real Estate?
Why Google Turned into a Social Butterfly
