Yesterday evening, our own Marshall Kirkpatrick was a guest on G4TV’s “Attack of the Show” television program to discuss Google’s OpenSocial platform. Marshall gave his thoughts on why Google formed a foundation with Yahoo! and News Corp. (MySpace) to govern the open source project, and what that means for users and data portability. He also spoke about why Facebook has stayed away from OpenSocial so far and offered thoughts on whether or not the platform will end up succeeding. An excerpt and video is below.
Kevin Pereira (Host): What can the foundation do that Google’s open source initiative couldn’t? Is the foundation merely just the agreeance [sic] that no one is going to sue?
Marshall Kirkpatrick: Well, I’m sure they’ll have a lot of discussions about technical matters, in order to make things go smoothly, but there is a risk that this is another committee, with more cooks in the kitchen and that might end up slowing things down.
Pereira: Who’s the sous chef here, though? Because I know originally there was a bunch of concern that, yeah, there’s some cooks in the kitchen, but Google is designing the menu and inviting everybody to the restaurant, to stick with that analogy. Are they really in that much control over the “OpenSocial?”
Kirkpatrick: You know, it’s starting to look like they might not be, and the fact that Yahoo! is joining is a really good sign, because Yahoo! has a lot of really innovative people in it, and they’re working on a lot of other approaches, a lot of other strategies around openness, and open source, and innovation. So that’s a really good sign.
Check out the full interview (about 5 minutes) below.
