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Google's engineer talks OpenSocial and the price of innovation
Q&A: Kevin Marks, Google engineer

By Caroline McCarthy

Published: Monday 03 March 2008

When the Future of Web Apps conference (Fowa) wound down on Friday, a few things were clear, not the least of which is the fact that open standards are a big factor.

Google engineer Kevin Marks gave a talk at Fowa about APIs and Google's role in the developer community. Marks, a veteran of blog search start-up Technorati, now works on the search giant's OpenSocial initiative, which is working toward a universal standard for social networking standards and is slated to launch on MySpace.com and Hi5 as well as Google's own Orkut soon. He also works on the Social Graph API, which aims to consolidate data across disparate social networks.

Marks took some time to chat about OpenSocial on MySpace, that wacky Silicon Valley exuberance and his view that a tough economy won't hurt innovation - because the cost of innovation has gone down.

A-Zs…

1. Security from A-Z…

2. Biometrics from A-Z…

3. Broadband from A-Z…

4. Wireless from A-Z…

5. Green IT from A-Z…

On advising fellow developers…
Kevin Marks: I say, "OK, stop and think about your application. Do you really need to be a standalone site? Do you really want to write user registration code, or would you be better off taking your application and bringing these other sites where there are lots of users already and where they have already expressed both their personal information and their connections to other people?"

On whether he'd encourage them to use OpenID
OpenID is closer to the Social Graph API, because OpenID is like, "I own this URL".

Conflict or complement? OpenID and Social Graph API and whether they can co-exist
OpenID and the Social Graph API are perfectly complementary. OpenID is one of the things that we index as a connection, and if you use OpenID to say, "Yes, I own this URL", that means that you can call the Social Graph API and see what assertions spread out from that URL. So it'll give you more confidence that the person is who they say they are. It's not me giving the site your URL and impersonating you, because you verified that URL.

On the hype of openness and whether or not it's unhealthy…
No, I think it's a healthy trend. The point is that open standards are better than closed standards, and open source software is better than closed-sourced software in lots of ways. There's a lot of good to doing stuff in public and doing it in the open and getting community feedback and that's a big part of OpenSocial particularly. We started that out, we announced it in November, and basically said, "OK, this is out in public now, we want to have a public debate about what we're doing, this isn't some secret thing we're going to hide for a couple years and then ship. This is out there."

We've been iterating with different developers, going around and finding what we need to change and updating that for the last few months, and now we're at a point where we've got some code that we're ready to release on three very large social networks over the next month. So that process has been out there, and it's been getting more open over time.

On MySpace surprises…
I think the surprises will be how users interact with it, because that's the stuff you can't know until you do a big launch. I can't give you any code surprises but what we'll find is that users will start using it and developers will start realising that it fits in different places and there are different things you can do.

One of the things that MySpace has that is interesting is that you can install applications both on your profile page and on your user page. So you can have applications that are sort of performing to others, and applications that are shown only to yourself so that you can analyse things. If you think about the social networks, there is this split between public performance and private interaction. Some sites are all public performance and everything happens on the profile, and some sites there's much more of a reflective view of showing the user what's going on. MySpace has both those pages.

And OpenSocial has these abstractions that will tell you where your app's running and what the context is. So you can write the same app but it will give you different things in both contexts. It'll do one thing when it's on your profile showing to the world, and another thing when it's on your page just showing things to you. One will be outward facing, one will be inward facing.

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