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 :)