Lane LiaBraaten of the OpenSocial Team says, "Too many of these sites access your list of friends by asking for your username and password so they can sign in as you and scrape your contact lists. The problem is that once a website has your password, it can access all sorts of data, not just your contacts."

According to PortableContacts.net, the Portable Contacts project seeks to create:

- A common access pattern and contact schema that any site can provide

- Well-specified authentication and access rules

- Standard libraries that can work with any site

- and absolutely minimal complexity, with the lightest possible toolchain requirements for developers.

Portable Contacts (or PoCo as they call it) builds on existing standards and libraries. It uses the same data format as the OpenSocial REST protocol, and the secure part comes from OAuth. Developers who want to implement PoCo need to register their domain and get an OAuth key.

Then they can use Plaxo’s Portable Contacts test client to send test queries. More info can be found within the Portable Contacts Developer’s Guide on Google Code.

"That means there’s representation for projects that span DiSo, OpenSocial, Open Stack, Facebook Connect, Y!OS, MySpaceID, among others," notes John McCrea, who liveblogged the meeting, and also shares the following related video from the Open Stack Meetup:

The mission: make some progress toward a standardization of user generated content or "activity streams."

Imagine if all the social networks were somehow unified as one communication medium. Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web uses a couple of really good analogies to describe the event:

1. "Just like a standard size of railroad track helped the trains get across the US like they had never done before (thus opening a new era of commerce and communication) so to do all these social media signals need some common format standards to travel from one website to another."

2. "Activity streams are already a big deal, but if these conversations can be fruitful, the results will be as big as the point in history when customers of different email providers became able to email each other or different telephone company customers became able to call each others’ phones."

It’s quite obvious that the web is going in a more social direction altogether, and the need to have such standards will increase right along with the number of sites going social. With all these data portability projects on the loose, it’s going to be important to have some common ground established, and it’s great to see all of these players are working together to acheive this.   

Ning, for those unfamiliar is not so much a social network, but a platform from which others to create their own social networks. Kyle Ford at the Ning Blog highlights the following features of the company’s integration with OpenSocial:

- The OpenSocial directory on each network automatically inherits the branding and visual design of that network.

– OpenSocial applications on Ning can inherit the visual style of the member profile page to which they’re added.

– OpenSocial applications are automatically integrated into a network’s viral loops. The ability for OpenSocial applications to write to a member’s latest activity feed, send messages on behalf of the member and spread using a network’s default viral sharing options are all there by default.

"Ning is considering integration with Facebook’s platform," writes Venture Beat’s Eric Eldon. "Facebook, however, has been internally debating how to fully open its platform; in the meantime, Ning has focused on OpenSocial integration." Facebook integration would surely be a smart move for Ning. Friendster went this route just last week, and with Facebook looking to expand global operations, it’s probably as good a time as any to jump on board with them.

OpenSocial will provide a great deal of usefulness for Ning users though. The more applications that are available to integrate into a user’s own social network, the more value that network will potentially have for users of that.

"For the developers that have invested resources in developing and launching a Facebook app, Friendster has now made it very easy for them to ‘port’ these applications to Friendster, enabling them to tap into Friendster’s 80 million users," said David Jones, vice president of global marketing for Friendster. "For Web 2.0 companies that have developed apps using Facebook and OpenSocial APIs, they now have the flexibility to choose between approaches when launching applications on Friendster."

Said companies will be interested to know that Friendster is the biggest social network in Asia, so this news probably shouldn’t be taken too lightly. 60 out of 80 million of Frienster’s users are in Asia. There is also the fact that Friendster’s user base does not overlap significantly with other social networks, so developers would potentially be reaching a whole lot more people than if they were just putting their apps on Facebook, for example. Friendster only has 22% overlap with Facebook, and is a top 10 global website and the 3rd largest social network in the world in terms of traffic, with over 19.4 billion page views a month.

Justin Smith at Inside Facebook notes, "Friendster is less restrictive about which parts of the application can be monetized. Developers can put ads on any real estate they control, including the profile page."

It certainly sounds like a great opportunity for developers looking to take their applications global. Facebook’s opening of an international headquarters in Dublin may lead to other interesting opportunities down the road as well.

AOL’s $850 million acquisition of Bebo was officially completed just nine days ago, so in one sense, the aging corporation has acted pretty quickly.  In another, it was terribly slow – most other OpenSocial members joined the group last year, and even Yahoo stepped forward in early March.

 AOL Joins Forces With OpenSocial

Ah, well.  In any event, while reporting live from Google I/O this afternoon, Mark Hendrickson wrote, "AOL joins OpenSocial today.  Their suite of products will support the standard."  David Glazer, Google’s vice president of engineering, was behind the statement.

This news caused Hendrickson’s colleague, Erick Schonfeld, to ask, "So is AOL just hedging its bets in the social network wars?  Looks like it.  With Facebook planning to open-source its platform, it will be interesting to see if AOL shows up as a partner for fbOpen as well."

AOL’s PR reps would have to really talk up the aren’t-we-all-friends aspect of such a development, however, if the company has any intention of appearing less than desperate.

Google’s new offering is literally on the heels (if social networks had heels) of MySpace and Facebook, both of which announced similar concepts last week. MySpace introduced Data Availability, which allows MySpace users to incorporate their profile information on select partner sites like Yahoo, Photobucket, Twitter, and eBay.

That was Thursday, and on Friday Facebook unveiled Facebook Connections, an extension of the wildly popular third party application platform, which allows Facebookers to take their profile, friends, and interactions to any participating third party website.

Google Friend Connect seems to take it one step further by being virtually all-network-inclusive. Without knowing the first bit of code, webmasters can make it so visitors can interact with their friends as well as incorporate third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.

"Google Friend Connect is about helping the ‘long tail’ of sites become more social," said David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google, in a statement. "Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other.

"That used to be hard. Fortunately, there’s an emerging wave of social standards — OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality."

Google presents the example of indie musician Ingrid Michaelson’s incorporation of iLike, an OpenSocial application, on her website. Visitors to Michaelson’s site can see comments made by their friends, add music to their profiles, and see who is attending a concert.

Google Friend Connect, which the company touts will make "any app, any site, any friends" a reality, will be available to a select group following the close of Campfire One, a developers conference held at the Googleplex, so it’s not yet live. Webmasters wanting to participate in the preview release will have to sign on to a waiting list when the site goes live later today. 
 

"The sandbox includes support for OpenSocial, a common API designed to let you easily build social applications that run on a growing number of web containers," noted Saurabh Mathur on the Google Code Blog.  "The iGoogle OpenSocial container also supports canvas view, allowing developers to build powerful and feature-rich full-page applications for iGoogle’s tens of millions of users."

 iGoogle Developer Sandbox

Mathur continued, "To get started, please begin with the documentation and examples on the iGoogle developer website.  The site includes detailed information about iGoogle and a guide to incorporating the new social features."

This isn’t the same as demanding help building the next hot social network, but it’s easy to at least allow for that interpretation.  Orkut’s failed to find a foothold in America, and iGoogle and OpenSocial already have one.  A lot of personal info is in place; now Google’s getting some developers to work for free.

Whatever Google’s got in mind, however, it’ll probably be a while before it’s ready for public consumption.  Philipp Lenssen writes, "Just like the release of OpenSocial, the new iGoogle sandbox right now feels more like a flaky alpha experiment for brave-of-heart developers rather than something useful.  There are broken links in tutorials, character encoding issues, JavaScript bugs and more."

Yes, those mid-month rumors came true earlier today as Yahoo joined the likes of MySpace, LinkedIn, and Plaxo in support of OpenSocial specifications.  And in that official blog post, Dan Peterson noted, "This addition means even more distribution for developers, encourages participation by even more websites, and, most importantly, results in more features for users all across the web."

 Yahoo Joins OpenSocial

Admittedly, there may still some fundamental problems – this morning, our own David Utter summed up OpenSocial and wrote, "Kind of sounds like ‘write once, run anywhere’, doesn’t it?  I guess no one’s ever heard of Java."  Also, Peterson wasn’t able to provide much of a list of OpenSocial applications currently accessible to users, and Yahoo has even less than Google (see Orkut) in the way of successful social networks.

On the whole, though, this is at least a promising development from Google’s point of view.  Since it and Yahoo typically stand on opposite sides of every line, getting the Sunnyvale-based company to join OpenSocial counts as a moral victory.

We just wish Google had found some less shocking way to express its joy.

By joining OpenSocial, Yahoo would don the same "aren’t-we-friendly" halo as the group’s other members.  That’s the least of the (possible) move’s ramifications, however.

 Google’s OpenSocial

For one thing, developers might pay less attention to Facebook.  In reference to OpenSocial Stan Schroeder notes, "So far, Google, Friendster, hi5, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, XING and many others are on board.  If Yahoo joins, that would mean practically everyone is on the OpenSocial team . . ."

Another issue is what Yahoo’s move would mean for the Microsoft acquisition.  Erick Schonfeld writes, "[J]oining with Google appears to also be an attempt to further complicate any such deal.  Microsoft, of course, is a big investor in Facebook and handles a large chunk of its advertising.  If it ends up buying Yahoo, OpenSocial may be a deal Microsoft finds it needs to unwind."

Hurray for corporate politics, huh?  They’re at least as complicated as a medieval siege.  Still, it could be some time before we find out if the rumor – never mind these potential motivations – is true.

Notice the names, for starters.  Both use a lack of spacing and camel case capitalization that will equally frustrate your average writer.  Then – since lawsuits tend to be more solid when something other than spelling is at stake – there are the technologies’ purposes.

After all the coverage of it, everyone should have a fairly good idea of what OpenSocial does.  On the subject of OpenSN, Caroline McCarthy writes, "FindMeOn, which develops technology to aggregate profile data from various social-networking sites, created OpenSN as a way to convert a profile from one social network to another."

Sounds familiar, eh?  Although not exactly the same.  And as MarketingVOX points out, an imposing group of Google’s lawyers stand between FindMeOn and victory (or even, unless Google is feeling nice, a favorable settlement).

We’ll see where this goes, then, but given the pace at which the legal system works, don’t expect instant results.