Today at the We Media conference in Miami, Google’s OpenSocial Evangelist Kevin Marks good-naturedly crashed the event– then held his own session, titled "Abstracting the Social Cloud."
The highly anticipated response to social network Facebook is an open platform bringing together other social networks. Welcoming questions from the crowd, Marks emphasized that OpenSocial "wasn’t typical Google" and suggested that OpenID would play a large role in Gmail.
Marks stated early on that while Google’s Blogger uses OpenID for a few functions, "we expect to do more with OpenID…we don’t have URLs that represent people on Google– there’s work to be done there." When the crowd pressed him for concrete next steps, however, Marks deferred. Responding to one participant’s question as to whether Gmail would implement OpenID, Marks said, "I can’t make public announcements. Clearly that would be nice."
Other questions centered around Google’s motivations behind what many debate to be a "Facebook killer." New York Times reporter Saul Hansell and Mashable say OpenSocial is emphatically not out to destroy Facebook, but the Google’s insecurity about their slice of the social network pie seems at play. Marks emphasized the communal nature of the API: "The goal is not to be a Google web. if this iis to work it will have to be a standard suported by the community."
Pressed further, Marks said that if there were a ‘self-interested’ motivation, it’s that OpenSocial, "gets people using the web, and the more people use the web, the more they use Google."
Unless, that is, they use Facebook.
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Update: Kevin Marks clarified that "Google already supports OpenID in Blogger as both a relying party (letting you use external urls to comment) and as an Originating Party (letting you us your blogger URL as an OpenID)…other Google products don’t have memorable public URLs."