Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Don't see how OpenSocial allows users "to move among the walled gardens". It seems to allow applications to move, but users are still locked into each social network.

Btw, I like the "EBFB" acronym, but it's notable that Yahoo! is also absent. Seems this thing is limited to those who do not inconvenience Google. TOS is quite insightful in this regard.

Good point. But if a third party app can get at the social graph (as we now seem to call it), won't that facilitate moving from one garden to another? And if an app has access to multiple gardens, doesn't that mean I should be able to wave hello to (or sic zombies on) friends in other gardens?

The thing I keep wondering -- and I'm sure I'm not the only one -- is what the security model is. "It's as secure as Javascript" doesn't fill me with confidence, but that's not even the primary concern.

Most humans aren't security experts; they'll see that a widget does something shiny on their page, but won't realize that it also tries to install malware on the computers of everyone who visits their page. So unless the containers (or a third party working on behalf of those containers) starts certifying that particular app publishers aren't evil, things could get really messy out there.

There is no facility in OpenSocial specifically supporting apps in mapping identities across networks. This doesn't stop them from doing so, but would be essentially equivalent to creating an additional identity, which is then mapped to each container identity.

Also, applications' access to user data is subject to each container's TOS, which may very well limit the extent to which cross-network graph navigation is possible (as well as many other things).