Google's OpenSocial Further Entrenches JavaScript

Google is moving strongly into the social network space, but not by adding yet another social network to the dizzying array of such sites already vying for eyeballs. Instead, Google plans to offer a neutral JavaScript-based platform for creating apps that run inside social networks. This is a very smart position for Google to take. Its own social network, Orkut, has been a rare major bust for a company that often appears it can do no wrong. At the same time, Facebook has made great strides in gaining users of late, at least in part due to opening up its programming APIs to make it possible for third parties to develop apps that run in Facebook.

For security reasons, Facebook developed its own markup language called FBML and apps designed to work in Facebook must use that markup. This makes those apps unusable on other social networks (most notably perhaps MySpace).

Google chose JavaScript as the core language for developing the new cross-network apps. That's a smart move. JavaScript is clearly the client-side lingua franca of the Web, much as PHP is the de facto server-side scripting language, But while PHP has lots of competition, JavaScript all but owns the client side. The emergence of a loose bundle of technologies called AJAX, which makes it possible to create standalone application look and feel in a Web app, has really all but frozen out other languages in this important space.

Google has already lined up social networks Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle as partners, along with such rising app development stars as Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide. This leaves some awfully big social network players -- MySpace, Facebook, Microsoft, Bebo and Yahoo to name a few. But by choosing the gatekeeper role on the bridge between the social network and the end user, Google positions itself perfectly to ride above that fray. Eventually, assuming OpenSocial takes off as I suspect it will, those big guys will have to adopt Google's bridge even if only as a secondary, "also supported" technology alongside their own. And of course MySpace now has no such bridge; it will come as no shock to me if they adopt OpenSocial in the next 30-45 days.

I've been saying it since the early 90's at CNET: savvy Web developers need to master JavaScript. The case keeps getting stronger.