Last night I had a nightmare. I sat at my computer, and my Vista morphed into a Web app called Woogle, which included a productivity suite, a default search page, alerts, news, a Web analytics page, and all my social networking stuff in one place (and much, much more, all for fwee). I turned around and saw Bill Gates gagged and tied to a nice Aeron chair. Sergei Brin was looking over my shoulder, wearing a photovoltaic-cell powered propeller cap and holding a Subway Veggie Patty footlong.

Seriously, if I had this kind of nightmare, I’d need to get my head checked; but it’s a nice way to start a rant about OpenSocial. On the surface it looks good: Facebook and LinkedIn are the bad guys, because they won’t do open social standards. Google gets a bunch of cool Web 2.0 players on the Friend Connect band wagon, liberates us from social networking tyranny, et voila.

Except it feels like world domination and Microsoft all over again (Woogle = World Google). This way, we’re going to end up with the Internet Explorer of social platforms.

And to quote Dave Winer, one of the hyperbright bulbs behind RSS and SOAP: “Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don’t work. In this case it’s Google trying to undermine Facebook. And I don’t think it’s going to work.” This was said a few months ago. OpenAlliance now has 26 members, so at least from a popularity standpoint, it’s working; but I agree with the sentiment, and the long-term lack of viability.

I’m not having conniptions over Woogle. Who cares in the end about who owns the mall, as long as you can shop there. But this increasingly feels like the mall’s security guards are keeping my wallet and hand it over to me every time I go shopping.

The only way to make sure you and I own our data is to have real open standards backed by companies, gov agencies, and the public – not the oxymoron that brings together the words “Open” and “Google”.

Tags: google, open standards, OpenSocial

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 2:34 pm and is filed under We Search, We Score, We Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.