Michael Arrington’s announcement of Google’s plans to offer up a new set of APIs on November 5 has opened up a firestorm of discussion on the web. Part of the discussion is around semantics, which gives me quite the chuckle. Who cares if it is a social network or a social graph (although I did love Dave Winer’s post). In the end it’s about what it means. To some extent, even though I really love leveraging social networks, I feel sometimes we overdo it.

To me, the key part of Google opening up its APIs is best captured by Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWrite Web. Like Marshall, the short sighted focus on this being in response to Facebook actually surprises me. Google’s plans and thinking are at a much grander scale and have always been so (there is a reason they want to get intotrans-pacific cable), although judging from all the writing, this seems to actually be the case. Even if that were so, it’s only impacting the timing.

The opening up of APIs does something else in a more distributed, more general, sense. It gives developers access to an information resource that is far greater than anything we’ve ever seen. Something worth worrying about, yet something with tons of potential. Even in a limited sense, access to Google APIs empowers a lot of developers. With open APIs, it’s somwhat difficult to imagine the potential, which would be quite endless. However, like Marshall I hope/wish they go with OpenID as their infrastructure and not a GoogID. It also fits in better with Google’s more distributed vision of the web.

Technorati Tags: Google, APIs, Social Networks, Social Graph