A Platform for All Social Networks
March 25th, 2008 | by Brad King |Platforms are important.
That’s pretty deep, I know. I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain this best to people for the better part of a week. Here’s why they are important: they create a foundation that everyone can build applications up, which in turn allows more people access, which in turn creates more application building.
It’s a perpetual motion machine for the Internet. Think of it as a series of giant Leggos, each snapping on to the next one until you’ve build a house — or a car — or whatever you want. What you build will probably be different than what I build; that, however, isn’t the point.
We know platforms are good because you’re reading this online, in a browser. I can’t tell you what browser because there are several that have been build on the Web platform. They all work.
As social media takes off — and we’re in the first seconds post social media Big Bang, it’s important to make sure that there is a standard platform for building social networking sites, which will allow developers to create tools that will enable us to do anything we desire.
The OpenSocial working group hopes to do just that.
