A lot has already been written about Google’s Open Social initiative, which you can read elsewhere. Besides the boon for developers in general, the other big winners out of this write once, run anywhere approach will be enterprise. In many respects business has been lagging consumer adoption of the 2.0 phenomena, but no more.

Open social also means open enterprise as evidenced by the way in which Theiko‘s AppFactor is tapping into Salesforce (per Scott Blodgett) :

Our application, which will be free, is meant for customer facing professionals to visualize how their organization has touched a given customer. All of the raw data is available in Salesforce.com but is generally only available through reports. More importantly it’s not very easy to figure out who knows the customer best. OpenSocial makes it possible to visualize and drill into the nature of customer relationships.

Using the OpenSocial APIs we’ve built a tag cloud representing interactions between a given customer (Salesforce.com Contact) and a given organization.

Terence Russell has echoed this sentiment, pointing out that Open Social may give rise to the advent of an era of maturity for business apps.

It will indeed be interesting to see how quickly other SaaS players pick up on this.