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Many people have written to ask about Google’s OpenSocial initiative, so I thought I would put a few resources together to get people started thinking about how dating and OpenSocial can work together to improve the online dating experience.

OpenSocial defined:

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.

The open API will have three parts

1) People - information about individual people and their relationships to each other.

2) Storage - a simple key-value data store to allow server-free stateful applications.

3) Activity stream - ability to post and view updates on what people are doing.

While social networks are all opening up with API’s, dating sites, which traditionally have a stranglehold on their members, appear slow to adopt the new open format of data and profile sharing.

OpenSocial presents some very interesting opportunities and implications for dating sites. Portability of profile information: Publish your profile information once. Joining sites that supports OpenSocial pulls your profile info in, no more recreating the wheel every time you join a new site.

Engage and eTwine are the only dating sites I’ve seen to leverage OpenSocial so far.

Suneet Wadhwa, CEO of Engage:

We’re committed to delivering the best and most enjoyable dating and socializing features to our members, and we realize that some of those features will be developed externally. OpenSocial will help Engage members customize a social dating experience with features that are best of the Web, fun to use, personally comfortable and romantically rewarding. Engage is currently building out an OpenSocial developer sandbox and expects to actively participate in the community as it evolves.

Engage OpenSocial press release.

eTwine, which operates IamFreetonight, has announced it will be supporting OpenSocial. eTwine’s social networking applications already have over 3 million installations with over 200,000 users on a daily basis.

According to the OpenSocial Wikipedia entry:

As reported by TechCrunch on November 5, 2007, OpenSocial was also quickly hacked. The total time to hack the OpenSocial-based iLike on Ning was just 20 minutes, according to TechCrunch, with the attacker being able add and remove songs on a user’s playlist, and to look into information on their friends.

There will always be a downside to sharing so much information freely, from a security and user perception POV. It’s going to be up to dating sites to mitigate the security issues and make members feel comfortable sharing information across dating sites. We’ll see how they adopt the initiative over the next few months. I’m especially interested to see how OpenSocial affects advertising and subscription revenue.

Here are a few links to get started understanding OpenSocial.

Google’s OpenSocial site.

OpenSocial API documentation

ReadWriteWeb OpenSocial coverage

O”Reilly Radar on OpenSocial

ZDNet, OpenSocial, what it means

• Userplane to Release APIs Supporting Google’s OpenSocial Standard
• Facebook to License its Social Networking Platform
• Dating Site Aggregator Copenda Launches Tomorow
• Evite enhances profiles
• Meetro Client Imports Myspace Info