Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

The buzz of the blogosphere is the announcement of Google’s OpenSocial. I thought that it would be a good idea to describe what it is, and what it might mean for the nonprofit sector. Marc Andreessen, who is, of late, connected to Ning, has a great blog entry with details.

OpenSocial is a set of APIs. It’s aimed primarily at developers. Google has a number of partners, including social network sites like LinkedIn, Friendster and Ning, as well as Salesforce, which does have very interesting implications given the increasing use of Salesforce in the nonprofit sector.

OpenSocial is a set of APIs that handle three different kinds of user data: profiles, social graph (who your friends are) and activities (the stuff of the Facebook news feeds.) And the language of these APIs are standard HTML and Javascript. Any application written for OpenSocial will work on any partner social network - any OpenSocial “container”. That means developers need only write an app once, and it can get used on any of the networks involved, like Orkut and LinkedIn. Basically, if the more social network sites that adopt OpenSocial, the more open the whole thing gets.

One of the big issues about social network platforms was that once Facebook made its platform available, and MySpace and LinkedIn followed, it looked like developers would have to port their apps to each social network. OpenSocial means, basically, they can port to a whole lot fewer of them. Hopefully, eventually, they can write their apps just once. Facebook has quite the motivation to keep people on Facebook, and keep the eyeballs there, because of their revenue model, which is ad-based. This breaks the whole thing open.

I’m not so clear about how this helps users. I expect, that because the APIs allow connections to profile, social graph, and activity data of users, that portability and permeability between social networks is bound to happen. But the path to truly portable (with adequate privacy controls) profile, social graph and activity data is still not entirely clear.

What does this mean for the nonprofit sector? Allan, in his inimitable style, talks about how most nonprofit organizations will not be able to take advantage of OpenSocial. No question about that. Most nonprofits haven’t even begun to take advantage of the Web 2.0 world in general, let alone the bleeding edge of OpenSocial. And I’m not entirely clear yet how many should be jumping on this bandwagon to either do fundraising or community-building. Friendster, Orkut, Hi5 and LinkedIn have very different demographic and geographic reaches. Ning, which is the social network of social networks, could end up being a very important player here.

I think that the inclusion of Salesforce in the mix will be very interesting for web-savvy nonprofits who are thinking about, or have started writing apps for social networks. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out - what kinds of integration will be possible between social network data and CRM data?

Anyway, OpenSocial is something I’ll be watching, playing with, and writing about as time goes on, and considering what it means for those of us in this sector.

Update: MySpace, SixApart (LiveJournal, Typepad and the newish social networking blog platform Vox), and Bebo have now all joined OpenSocial. This is getting really interesting!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 11:12 am and is filed under Nonprofit Tech, Open Standards, Web2.0. 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.