Apparently Google is working on the OpenSocial API (Techcrunch, O'Reilly) which should enable data exchange or some level of interoperability between social web sites.

 

That by itself is a noble but also futile cause. People can't agree on feed formats and we end up with RSS 0.93 through 2 and then Atom. The reason why these were so troublesome to establish is that they enable users to get the site's content without the site itself. The only reason why CNN gives full headers in their feeds is that the people that use feed readers often are now non-negligible in count, but still not too many such as to threaten the revenues of the site's ads.

 

So there ! Getting people to let you take your content and leave is a bitch.

 

Can you even consider what would happen if MySpace's users could just leave and take their belongings to Facebook ? The same thing that happened with the LiveJournal to MySpace exodus, which was enabled by the fact that users could upload all that much stuff and therefore weren't feeling too locked.

 

On top of these, the whole attempt at being 'open' is a very cheap play on people's emotions. Google has never before complained about the state of the social web, and obviously called no one else in the discussion. They just decided to create a format that will probably match, their Orkut service which happens to be the least common denominator.

 

Oh and exchange formats are bitch to get right too. Can you export your wordpress blog and bring it into typepad ? It appears possible, maybe in 2005. How about back again ? Didn't think so either.

 

Exchange formats for markets that are not uniform simply stifle innovation. Bottom line, it would be much more honest and effective if they just asked sites to provide an export of their data to any format and let the sites that receive them to make sense of it.