In this post I outline a few features that I hoped Open Social was about but quickly learnt it wasn’t. When I first read the name of Google’s recent social networking play ‘Open Social’, I immediately made a connection with Open ID, expecting to read that it was finally a way to have one base of profile data and friends across multiple social networking sites. Instead I read somewhat disappointingly that Open Social is, albeit usefully, only a way for developers to build applications that work across multiple social networking sites. So what exactly would I have liked Open Social to be?

Well, the key issues for users in encountering so many social networks on the Internet are having to join so many of them; entering similar data each time; maintaining several user ids etc. To understand these issues, let’s imagine that you like the hit TV series CSI and come across a social network for it. In spite of your love for the series, would you really consider it worth your while to yet again enter profile data about your contact details and interests? Would it not be much better to:

1. Find that the CSI social network supports Open ID and therefore, you don’t need a new one for it
2. Find that the CSI social network supports Open Social, and have that mean that you can simply click on an Open Social link and have relevant and/or selected profile data made available to the CSI social network
3. Be able to see which of your friends from other networks (websites) are also on the CSI network and connect with them
4. Be able to notify friends from other websites that you have joined the CSI network and perhaps to be able to search for and invite those who have mentioned CSI in their ‘open profiles’?

The last point above leads nicely into my next, which is that in a sense Open Social may have missed a trick with the definition of their Containers and Apps. According to Marc Andreessen of Ning – an Open Social partner – a  Container is a social network that supports Open Social and Apps are applications built by the likes of iLike, RockYou and Flixter on these networks. In my opinion, Open Social should itself be thought of as a container and the social networks as applications that sit within it. That way, just like you get when a friend installs an application in Facebook, you could amongst other things get an Open Social notification when a friend joins a new social network. Applications by iLike etc could then become sub-apps within the social networks.

I feel that I must stress that I don’t mean to trivialise Open Social in its current form at all, but as Josh Cantone of Read/WriteWeb put it, people join networks because of friends, not because of applications. He also adds quite rightly that social networks exist for users and not for developers. Perhaps Open Social will evolve into some semblance of what I have outlined above but for now, one has to ask what is in it for the user. So for now, like Scoble, I will be sticking with Facebook.