Dave Winer does a great job of summarizing up the etymology of OpenSocial while taking a stab at Facebook and Google at the same time. I agree with his basic idea. There is no need for us to get locked into one or the other social network. The data trail we leave on these sites isn’t extremely complicated. It should be fairly easy to share it among networks. However, Facebook and friends prefers to keep the users locked into their respective silos.
Okay now we have Open Social to add to a long list of Opens and Frees.
Open Source — let’s see your source code.
Open Doc — let’s get rid of Office.
Open ID — let’s see your users.
Free Software — no code-level lock-in.
These aren’t good or bad, they just serve someone’s interest without thinking about the users’ interest (at best) or counter to the users’ interest (at worst).
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