OpenSocial Alliance: Are You Our Friend, Or Their Friend?

Interesting news in the world of virtual friend-gathering: Yesterday, MySpace and Google announced an alliance called OpenSocial, designed to offer a set of standards for developers of applications that run on any of the many social sites. I continue to stand by buggy, slow and wacky MySpace because a) it's got the largest worldwide membership and b) it has had a strong musician/band focus since day one (and no skewing of musical genres, either, in my opinion, unlike, say, GarageBand, which skews to rock and alterna-pop). The drama is in the fact that media darling Facebook is not yet in the alliance. Facebook, which I just joined, is extremely clean. You can tell a lot of thought went into the user interface. But I haven't done enough with it to decide whether I like it.

Today, several third-party developers, such as Plaxo, announced new applications using the OpenSocial APIs. I decided to check out the API documentation on Google: Apparently, the OpenSocial API works from the client-side using the JavaScript API or the server-side using RESTful data APIs. With the JavaScript API, you can get information about people and their relationships, get updates on what they're doing and persist datafor server-free stateful apps. On the server-side, you can use the People and Friends data API to view and update profiles and friendships, obtaining lists of friends or following connections to see detailed profiles.

I've already used a few of the MySpace apps on my MySpace page (Slide.com is one). I'd love to see the JavaScript for a simple one of the these and see how manageable it is.

I do find myself wondering where the money is for some of these apps. Is it all in the ad traffic? Is that how Slide makes its money?