You might be interested to join a social network (hosted by Ning) about Google’s Open Social API. It’s interesting that this Google API is basically providing a mediation function to other APIs, not unlike the function provided by what Telco’s call a Service Delivery Platform, although SDP is a broad and abused term.

I argued many years back that it was the ‘job’ of the Telcos to provide useful network-based functions for developers, especially to deal with the ongoing fracas of fragmentation amongst devices and APIs etc. Google is now doing a similar function for the fragmentation in social-networking APIs. The premise is simple. Social networking should not be a vertical activity limited to certain sites (e.g. LinkedIn), but should be a horizontal feature of the web.

They are right of course and also very clever to be first in putting infrastructure into place to facilitate “making the web social”.

Google see their mission as enabling universal access to the world’s data, including my data (and yours, and my friends and so on). This is why they can think so broadly and spark initiatives like Open Social whilst their dominant revenue model remains search-based advertising. Moving over to mobile operators, if only they saw their mission as enabling universal connectivity between people instead of ‘making money from RF licenses’, then they would be involved with initiatives like this as a matter of course.

Google’s Android continues to attract a lot of attention, although I don’t think it has anything that exciting to talk about technically. Of course, that doesn’t really matter. It comes from the same company who spend gazzilions in real innovation on the web and who have brought us Open Social. Sooner or later these initiatives will meld together, courtesy of the bright spark developers out there playing with all this stuff. Up will pop another iPhone, even better than the real thing!

As I walk around with my iPhone, it has a fantastic UI and is a joy to use etc. However, I still feel like I’ve got essentially the same type of familiar phone/ipod experience, just better packaged. I don’t feel like I’m connected to the digital world in new and exciting ways (read the first chapter in my book to see what that means - although wait for the 2nd edition). A ’social networking’ device would be a new experience. Hurry up you Google Gadgeteers and give us something really exciting.

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