Steve,
OpenSocial is a very interesting idea. However, I suspect that GroupServer,
along with most other social-networking software, will not adopt OpenSocial
because of the poor portability of the applications, and increased expense in
development. I have a few things to say about the distributed authentication
aspects of OpenSocial, but I have said that in a blog post ☺
http://blog.onlinegroups.net/2008/12/05/openid-facebook-connect-and-the-neglected-cardspace/
Portability of OpenSocial applications is poor because they run within “iframe“
elements, from what I can determine. This prevents applications looking or
behaving like the host site. For example, a MySpace application running within
Orkut will look and feel like a MySpace application, not an Orkut application
(and vice versa). Contrast this with a Java application, which works (mostly)
like an Apple MacOS application on MacOS, and a Microsoft Windows application
on Windows.
Portable applications are expensive to develop. While standards help, a
portable application *must* be tested on every platform it will run on. For a
Visual Basic application, this means testing on all variants of Windows that
you will come across. For a Web page, this usually means testing with every
browser *and* every operating system that is likely to be used, as the
“platform“ is a combination of the two. For OpenSocial, the application must be
tested on all likely host-sites with all likely browsers and all likely
operating systems.
This combinatorial explosion with testing is a killer for portable
applications. Lets say a documented test takes an hour (so it would be a simple
application). Testing would use four browsers (some combination of Internet
Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera) on five operating systems (some
combination of XP, Vista, PPC Mac, Intel Mac and Linux) on a similar number of
host sites (Orkut, Facebook, MySpace, Beebo, LinkedIn). That is 100 hours of
testing, without going near any mobile (Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia) or console
(Wii, PlayStation, X-Box) devices!
