People Search Digest

The news everyone in the social search industry is talking about this morning is Google’s OpenSocial. Not to be confused with Socialism or even Socialstream, OpenSocial is alive and kicking at a website near you. Having gone live literally hours ago, the site contains the official OpenSocial API documents, developers blog, featured community gadgets, and videos.

Perhaps most exciting though, is that the list of OpenSocial partners mentioned in the last 24 hours seems to have grown quite a bit from mostly just semi-major and major players like Engage.com, Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Six Apart and XING - to a list of over 80 partners published this morning. Most conspicuous among OpenSocial partners is the one currently NOT on the list: Facebook. Time will tell if Facebook will come out to play, or keep their own applications and stay home. How this will effect social and info search remains to be seen. In the mean time, expect OpenSocial to very likely thrive. The reason? Standards that standardize conduct while leaving open the opportunity for innovation, succeed.