People keep wondering whether Orkut will grow and/or how Google will “catch up” in the social networking race. OpenSocial is one answer, and it potentially paves the way for social network “interoperability” and open profiles. But there’s also another interesting angle here that occurred to me.
Google itself is morphing into a kind of platform for social interaction. Beyond OpenSocial, its applications (ie., Calendar, Mail, Talk, News, Maps, Earth, Picasa, iGoogle, Docs, Groups, CSE, APIs) have become or are becoming more social in various ways. By integrating or enhancing the social, community and collaborative elements of all these applications Google itself is transforming into a kind of social media platform.
