Cerado Haystack, our white-label social networking platform for businesses and associations, will be supporting Google’s Open Social efforts in a number of ways over the coming months (more on OpenSocial here). In particular, Cerado will be:
1) Enabling Haystack to be a container for Open Social apps
2) Creating applications that leverage the Open Social API that can be embedded into other applications and environments
What is Open Social? Well, remember all that buzz a couple of months ago when Facebook announced their proprietary API that allowed developers to create applications for the Facebook platform? Now, that same notion can take place for any site on the web. (By the way, Marc over at Ning sums it up well, and his analysis of the implications for FB are spot-on.)
We already have an Open API, and have been long-time supporters of efforts such as OpenID. As such, we see the release of Open Social is a very good thing for the industry and, in particular, enabling better connection with information about individuals and their activity streams and creating a standard way to integrate that information with business applications (especially customer-facing ones) is a huge step forward.
Well done, Google.