Brad Feld

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Microsoft Bloggers on OpenSocial

Nov 04, 2007
Category Technology

If you are paying attention to the Google OpenSocial thing, I have two great blog posts for you. 

The first is for the business people and users that are trying to get their mind around the implications of OpenSocial to Facebook.  Don Dodge – who I’ve been friends with for a while – has an outstanding post up titled 50M Facebook users don’t care about OpenSocial APIsDon unabashedly comes from the Microsoft side of the world (which is teamed up with Facebook) but cuts to the “user dynamics” of the situation very clearly.

The second is for the nerds.  Dare Obasanjo is a Microsoft blogger who I read daily.  I don’t know Dare well (I met him briefly at Gnomedex several years ago) but have plenty of respect for his abilities, both as the creator of RSS Bandit (an open source RSS newsreader) and for his long, thoughtful blog posts.  In Google OpenSocial: Technical Overview and Critique he compares his first impression of OpenSocial API to the Facebook platform.

While both Don and Dare are coming at this with a Microsoft bias (and I expect everyone currently knows of the lack of love between Microsoft and Google these days) they are both very useful posts to help balance out the hyperbole of endless “wow – this is amazing” feedback that broke out over the last few days. 

I expect this next week to be a flurry of additional information and critique (positive and negative) on OpenSocial along with at least one key upcoming Facebook announcement.  These are good posts to read to ground you in reality before another crescendo builds.