If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free

If you love someone, set them free, set them free… If you are a fan of Sting, you must know this song (video on YouTube).

OpenSocial, Facebook F8, Bebo API, Friendster platform…, yeah, the Internet is suddenly open up. The big players will be all open, load’s of companies will be following, so what will happen to developers, will they get crazy with developing the endless applications for each open-something? what will happen to the users, will we get bored to see that the same service is replicated everywhere? What is the Precious of the Internet, what on earth do we love more in Web2.0? Videos, photos, music, news, social connections etc, it is the Data we truly love.

Why should we applaud the OpenSocial, Facebook and many others? Kevin Marks, one of the main evangelists of the OpenSocial project said:

“The goal of this is to provide infrastructure….The broad thing is much more potential users. There’s a much larger user base across many more social network platforms and in many different countries and social groups…”

So is it all about the future of Internet? It is My data, I develop an application based on the data running on many places, so you can use the data but you have to follow the way I designed and use it inside the application? Is there anything missing? If we love the data, shall we just do what Sting sings, Set It Free.

Let’s make some wishes before the Xmas ’07 comes. We hope that there can be really one infrastructure as promised and the applications can be built once, running everywhere; We hope that more websites can provide us with the RSS or API so the applications built on this data can be portable and become more valuable; We hope with the data open, all our favourite services and contents can be mashed up into one place to be my Internet Identity.

Tim O’Reilly had the thoughts, TechCrunch questioned on the business model. If you love someone, set them free. A great song by Sting, a great concept for Internet.

Technorati tags: OpenSocial, Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, Tim O’Reilly, Sting, Set Data Free