OpenSocial is not about sharing Friends
I see this again and again, most recently in this post about Google Reader. There VentureBeat argues that Google should use OpenSocial to find out who my friends are and hence who can read my shared items. While a nice idea, this is totally not what OpenSocial is, at least not in its first incarnation. This was confirmed to my on le web 3 this year.
The thing is that OpenSocial is only about allowing your to write an app/widget and have it run anywhere, more or less. You will have one hock inside Ning, LinkedIn, and whoever else is a member to get the friends of the current user and then do stuff with it. I am not even sure if you can get the friends but if you do you will get the friends of the currently logged in user in the system you are on. It’s not like you can export your social graph and find your friends on LinkedIn for use inside Google Reader. That is not the point of this first verison. It is just there to give a bigger possible install base for your applications.
With that said, further going through my “still to read and possibly write about” items 
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You're right that at the moment, OpenSocial doesn't offer third party developers a way to use data like "friends" from social networks within their own, free-standing applications. But most of OpenSocial isn't ready, anyway.
There are already examples of the sorts of "friends" data integration that I discussed. Check out this screenshot of a LinkedIn calendar application (not yet released) that shows links to your LinkedIn friends' profile on other social networks.
http://venturebeat.com/2007/12/09/linkedin-laun...
Furthermore, since Google is spearheading development of the OpenSocial APIs, it has the ability to build out this concept and apply it to Reader.
Of course, OpenSocial is a work in progress and each member social network will need to decide how much data could be available on other sites. Note that Bebo is offering such a feature.
See Techcrunch's coverage of the Bunchball application:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/27/bunchball-...
Ultimately, Facebook already offers this functionality -- so does Bebo and LinkedIn's nascent developer platforms -- and its pretty clear that OpenSocial will at some point, in some form.
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not sure where you got the info that those links on the calendar app are going to other social networks, just as I do not see this in the screenshot somehow. This can also be done through including links to other social network within your profile. See id.thylmann.net/othylmann/ for my version of a noserub profile, an open source framework that one of our internal developers has started in his spare time. As we are really trying to leverage the social graph for a more personal marketing system in the long term, this is very important to us.
But yes, there is already a little interaction available. What I am really looking for though is that I don't have to be friends 20 times but just once. A hub that noserub is trying to be. Access to the real friend data from the outside with auth by the user. For that we probably need url based identifiers as seen here: http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2008/01/03/its-high-...
The thing is that currently an app running inside facebook can access the facebook friends data, but it's hard to get that same data if I am not on facebook. It would be like running a widget on netvibes with my facebook data that makes available the information to all other widgets within netvibes.
Need to post about that, damn. :)
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