I was hoping that by the time I wrote this, Open Social would no longer be the top story on Techmeme. So much for that thought. Spending time telling you all about it is somewhat pointless, since it’s been covered all over the web (TechCrunch has a pretty decent writeup). But what does it mean, not just in the scope of this announcement but the long term future of Google and the web.

Some time ago, I wrote about the Mythical WebOS. There I talked about a Word Wide Grid, a combination of distributed computing, distributed storage, and distributed applications. If we keep that backdrop in mind, our friends in Mountain View have made some interesting moves lately.

1. Getting into the wireless spectrum race
2. Planning to install undersea cables
3. Talking about releasing core technology as open source
4. OpenSocial
5. Mobile plans, e.g. gPhone

This in addition to all the investments in hardware infrastructure makes me think that Facebook was just a catalyst for Google to make public the first step of a grand plan. OpenSocial, in a way, is a small step in taking advantage of the entire web as a platform, in this case, a social platform. Marc Andreessen sums it up really well describing some of the impact of OpenSocial, especially for developers. If you take Vic Gundotra’s statement and combine them with this move and the gPhone (assuming it’s true), then what you have are the seeds of a true platform, one on the web, and the other mobile.

Is this too ambitious even for Google? Will be be economically sustainable? That is the multi-billion dollar question. However, instead of letting Google play this game on its own, companies like Yahoo, and perhaps even Amazon, should work together with Google to develop a new set of standards, that make the web that much more interoperable, much like standards like HTTP have powered todays web. If the web is a platform, what Google announced is the middleware that we can use to communicate across our networks and applications. This is a lot more complex than I can comprehend at this time, but the sheer audacity and potential of this move is worth the risk (and it is very risky).

Nick Carr, with whom I often disagree, but surprisingly agree with about as often, sums it up like this

Google’s introduction of OpenSocial, which, as Marc Andreessen explains, provides a kind of universal two-way connector between web applications and social networks, marks an important moment in the transformation of the World Wide Web into what I term, in The Big Switch, the World Wide Computer. The internet, as Google frequently points out, is the new computing platform, and OpenSocial - whether it succeeds or not - gives us a view as to how that platform may operate.

This is not a fun project. Having Oracle and SalesForce involved takes this beyond just the world of web 2.0 and social networks and into the enterprise. The next few years are going to be very interesting.

UpdateThings just got a lot more interesting

Further reading:
VentureBeat
Screencast and screenshots from Marc Andreessen

Technorati Tags: Open Social, Google