BrandHacker Meetup - Google's Open Social

I attended the BrandHacker meetup last night at Zanzibar in Hell's Kitchen. The setting was nice... an intimate private room in the basement with good wine and some delicious onion rings. Perfectly laid-back for a good discussion of Google's Open Social.

The Open Social Foundation is like the UN of various social media properties like LinkedIn or MySpace (or, in open social speak, "containers"). It's supposed to be a neutral entity that's only concerned about the development of standards. They've built a standard language/platform that aims to be the Esperanto of social media application development.

There were three Googlers on hand for a powerpoint that turned into more of a roundtable discussion. Top four takeaways:

• Met some great, smart people: Josh, Stephan, and John espcially.
• Killer app for Open Social is going to open up data silos - a cross-network game or application that plays to strength of each Container.
  
• I've got to start using Google-hosted AJAX libraries. Cool, simple, brilliant idea.
• Google's position in all of this is interesting. They really are pretty altruistic. Seriously. They definitely towed the party line that "What's good for the Internet is good for Google," which is a pretty unusual position. But, it's hard to argue against the goodwill they're creating with developers, marketers and brands.