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Enterprise Goes Social: Write Once, Run Anywhere

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.

Tags: AppFactor, applications, apps, Enterprise, Google, Open Social, SaaS, Salesforce, Social Media, Theikos

Google set to outopen in face/space race

Application developers are the clear winners of Google’s pending release of Open Social.

Richard MacManus explains:

Open Social is a distributed social network framework…a ‘third place’ of social networks…a set of three common APIs that allow developer to access the following core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (News Feed).

 The following companies/social networks have apparently signed up to be a part of Open Social – Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, Orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce and Viadeo.

So far a bunch of  Facebook app developers, including Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide, have also signed up.

Richard rightly points out that this is an example of Google playing to its strengths – namely creating a distributed system and owning a chunk of a space through its own platform. It will be interesting to see how Facebook and MySpace react.

While some commentators are expressing doubt that they will come to the party, it is possible that this move by Google will lead to some de facto standardization across open APIs. Standards would assist app developers greatly by reducing the friction inherent in mastering the intricacies of every set of open APIs and should lead to a much wider distribution of apps across various social networks.

Om Malik feels that Open Social is attacking Facebooks achilles heel – its quintessential closed nature. A standardised Social Networking Markup Language far outweighs a closed Facebook-only ML.

Tags: applications, Facebook, Google, Open Social, social network