Sep
22
Googles Move to an Open API = Adoption of OpenID?
September 22, 2007 |
Techcrunch had an amazing post yesterday, which should make everybody think about the future of social web apps on the internet. If I draw the right conclusions we will see a future of profiles and social graphs that will be enabled to float freely between different sites. Sounds familiar? Sound like something we all would like to achieve with OpenID? Well, Google could make it happen all in a snap - with themselvges in the middle of everything, of course…
In consequence the same thing will happen with our attention data (think of http://attentiontrust.org). This means that Google, the company that started with the credo “don’t be evil”, goes back to its roots: they hand over the control over the users personal data back to himself again. This makes perfectly sense for their philosophy.
As Brad Fitzpatrick is one of the guys in charge of this project, I really hope that Google will demonstrate its openness by adopting the OpenID standard and connecting every Google Account to an OpenID URL, which will be the users central home on the web. By joining these masses of data together you could even call this the users online identity.
Even if my assumptions concerning OpenID adoption are to keen, this is really a big step, ’cause it completely changes the way internet companies are evaluated! Until now the first base for evaluations of web 2.0 startups was always the number of registered users. We clearly have to re-think this when user profiles are not locked up in silos any more.
The other question that has to be answered at Googles headquarters is what implications this new openness will have on the companies revenue stream. I can imagine that making use of the new Google API will be free in the beginning and maybe for non-commercial purposes, but in the long run they might charge some money for the usage. Just like they already do for the Google Adwords API.
BTW: no other internet company will be able to NOT JOIN Googles move in the long run, I guess this is almost needless to mention.
Funny that I posted about Google and attention data in the dev blog of YoWhassup.com just yesterday.
I guess we’re on the right track and I’m quite sure we’ll be one of the first companies to adopt the new Google API to our product.
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