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The announcement (Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle) of the Google’s Opensocial platform has certainly been the most discussed IT news item in the last few days.

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There have been enthusiastic comments by well-known and influential people, less enthusiastic comments of industry observers who see this as one more step toward Google owning the Internet, and balanced comments that try to see the good and the bad points. See also OpenSocial, Killer Apps and Regular People.

I also favor a balanced view. This is clearly a Google move against Microsoft /Facebook, and the Opensocial platform is not as open as they say (at this moment it requires the Google Gadgets platform, which is not open). It is certainly more open than the Facebook platform, but not very significantly so. At the same time, it is a step toward at least more interoperability between social networks, and this is a good thing.

As a user, I just do not have the time for too many social sites. Social networks are all about saving time (better organization of personal and professional contacts, integrated discussion space, discovery of people and resources, etc.) but “having” to be on too many social networks is a waste of time. The Web 2.0 is great but at this moment one must maintain an “identity” on too many sites to use it effectively. I wish to sign-on once and maintain a profile and a contact list on just one site, with the “system” taking care of replicating my profile on other sites. All three professional social networks that I use (mainly Viadeo, but also Linkedin and Xing) have joined Opensocial, so perhaps at some point I will be able to maintain my profile on one and export it to the others. Also, applications running on one network may be able to discover resources (new interesting contacts, calls for proposals) on other networks.

A partial list of social networks and service operators that have joined the Opensocial initiatives and participated in the opening event with their own demos is in the Opensocial blog on Campfire One: taking social applications to new frontiers. Interesting: “In fact, Viadeo, a business social network, says it believes that OpenSocial will soon become necessary, as business applications require very specialized knowledge, and no single social networking site can build out so many of these applications across verticals alone”. Viadeo is the first European partner to join Google’s initiative, and in my opinion the most usable professional social network. See the Mashable interview with Viadeo CEO Dan Serfaty to find out a little bit more about the company and how its involvement in OpenSocial came about.

Opensocial enables developers to write applications a la Facebook that will run on all social networks that have implemented Opensocial support (containers). Opensocial does not provide a single sign-on system - though it is easy to see the beginning of a push toward establishing the Google sign-on system as a de-facto single sign-on system. As a user, I would very much prefer a single sign-on system based on the fully open standard Openid, with value added services based on i-names. If a fully open, distributed metanetwork is established based on these open standards, then the Internet itself becomes the social network (as it should be).

Some bloggers have expressed fears that the Opensocial initiative, led by Google with the support of all the major players (but Facebook - too bad, as at this moment Facebook is by far the most usable and efficient social network) may kill open standards such as Openid in the cradle. I don’t think that so, because (at least as it is currently defined and implemented) Opensocial is an interoperability system and not an identity system.