Here are my new years thoughts on the social web platforms. I've been pondering what the world can do to get ourselves out of this one man/one graph/one api situation we find ourselves in and what Google can do to help.
Facebook the product and Facebook Connect/APIs have sucked up most of the social web oxygen. Open efforts have largely failed -- the Google-led consortium OpenSocial has been relegated to niche usage like enterprise or contextual gadgets, OpenID use is declining, Webfinger never took off, oEmbed has murky IP, even RSS and Atom are use is declining.
In particular OpenSocial is now paralleling a different OSF -- the _Open Software Foundation_. Remember that? DEC/IBM/etal banded together to fight off a common enemy (Solaris/AT&T or Windows). There was some decent output from it (I loved me some Tru64 OSF/1 Unix) but in the end it was Linux that disrupted and became the server standard while Windows claimed the defacto client standard. Today both OSFs are in decline and don't define the market.
So what to do? Here are a few of my ideas, what about yours?
* Obviously getting market share for Google+ the product and Google+ the platform helps, it provides an alternative. However if we're not careful we end up with a Coke/Pepsi duopoly, since much of our growth will come at the expense of the wider ecosystem before it starts to take from Facebook.
* Try to build on open standards where it sees broad based usage. OAuth 2.0 is something that everyone (including FB) has actually implemented. Activity Streams and schema.org are ascending. Add social to these where it makes sense.
* Try to nurture the next disruptor and be prepared to jump on it when it comes. Any technology that Google promotes as "open" will likely meet the similar fate as OpenSocial. (And I hope schema.org is the exception here...)
* Do something about the Terms of Service encumbered internet that's slowly taking off.
Hopefully sometime in 2012 there can be a way for everyone to work together on social. I hope to live to see the day that Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and a hundeds of smaller players can do something that lifts all our boats and benefits users.