Google Developers Day 2008 in Israel

Google's Developers Day 2008 tour has landed in Israel today. Google is looking for developer love and is doing their best to attract it. The main message coming from Google is "Let's work together to make the Internet a better place. The better it is, the better we're all off". Not forgetting that we're talking about a commercial company, not a charity foundation, their approach is, at least on the surface, quite amiable.

Perhaps the most interesting parts of the day, in regard to Colnect, were related to OpenSocial. From their website: "OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. Built from standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps with OpenSocial that access a social network's friends and update feeds. By using a common API, developers can extend the reach of their applications more quickly, yielding more functionality for users."

What does it really mean? As I see it, FaceBook has taken too big a share of the social networks world than Google (and others) think they deserve. One of the main reasons for the success of FaceBook is the FaceBook applications written by developers and extending FaceBook's functionality in many different directions. The problem is that developers are mostly unable to devote many efforts to writing their social applications to all social networks out there and would thus focus on the biggest ones. Orkut (Google's social network) is surely not the biggest and so the way to convince developers that they should write Orkut-complaint applications, we now have OpenSocial.

OpenSocial supports other networks as well which altogether (according to their figures) serve nearly 500 million users worldwide. Though I'm skeptical of how someone knows my Linked In and Orkut accounts are of the same person (they probably don't share email addresses around), it's still quite a big figure which should be a motivation enough for a developer to focus on it instead (or in addition to) FaceBook.

Colnect is about to release some social applications to the social networks world to assist collectors integrate their collectibles hobby with their other activities and help spread the word about Colnect to fellow collectors. OpenSearch seems an appealing choice since it involves many networks which cater to different crowds which altogether might coincide better with Colnect's target crowd than FaceBook.

Last but not least, there's the issue of Chrome, Google's new browser. While promoting it as simply a means to make your surfing better, it would still have been a bit more amiable and transparent to say "we've made our own browser so that we can make Google search the default search engine and not allow you to block AdWords ads with some addon". If Google really would have cared just for the web users community, it would have simply put more efforts into the existing open source browsers. In my experience, Chrome is still much inferior to FireFox.