The most valuable asset that any website can have is its users. As the number of users increases, the value of the site increases as stated by Metcalfe's law. In economic terms, this is the network effect. On websites and social networks this translates to .. "keep the users coming back".
The best scenario would be one where the user is tied to the site because it is difficult to migrate their data to another site and there is no reason to move to another site as the current one satisfy their needs
Therefore, for Facebook to embrace OpenSocial this would mean tearing down the walls it has spent a great effort to erect to keep its users in and nosey crawlers and bots out. OpenSocial will allow other social sites access to Facebook users and data. And yes, Facebook would have access to other users and data but I have a feeling that Facebook doesn't really care about the others.
Embracing OpenSocial will just tear down Facebook's walled garden. This would be the omg-it's-the-end-of-the-world scenario for Facebook. Facebook's strategy is simple, keep the wall up, make sure current users are satisfied with the service. Then, wait for users from other networks to join. Sooner or later, every man, woman and their dog will be using Facebook and the question then will be, "Who is behind the wall now?"
However, it's not all dark and gloomy for OpenSocial. One of the attractiveness of OpenSocial is that it allows new sites (OpenSocial containers) access to users and information from existing containers that support the OpenSocial API. This one sentence may soon lead to Facebook wannabes mushrooming up all over the place. It is still a windy road ahead for OpenSocial and hopefully the spec can be stablised soon. Security, privacy and policy issues will need to be sorted out quickly as well or Facebook may end up being the OpenSocial.
It must also be mentioned that the completion of the reference implementation for OpenSocial,
Shindig, is a crucial milestone. It should be made to run on as many development platforms as possible to cater for the multitude of developers out there.
I have attempted to port
Shindig and
Partuza! to
pesta and
raya respectively on the .NET platform. Both these implementations are still under development. The initial motivation for doing this was to allow myself to familiarise myself with the OpenSocial framework.
It must be remembered that the value of an idea is in its execution and Facebook has done an excellent job.
As a sidenote, the initial target market for Orkut was the United States but the majority of users are from South America. Maybe if they had restricted initial membership to the US like what Facebook did to ensure that the network will grow from a US base, things will not be the way it is now. Oh well, we all learn from mistakes... hopefully.