Where the hell is the Container API?
Yep, I'm still bitching about this stuff. The more I see, the more annoyed I get. — All this song and dance and wait, and the only sites that can play host to all the "exciting new applications" being created using the OpenSocial API are those invitees to the GOOG shindig last night.
Context & Ripple Effects
The complaint lands three days after Marc Andreessen framed Open Social as a new universe of applications spread across the web — a pitch premised on any site becoming an app host. The follow-up coverage has been enthusiastic about supply: PC World reported apps already being built for the platform, and analysts read it as Google's counter-move against Facebook's closed developer economy.
Beattie's post punctures that framing from the developer side: without a published Container API, the ability to *host* OpenSocial apps stays confined to the sites Google invited to its November 1 launch event. The open specification and the open distribution are, for now, two different things — a governance question the launch-week coverage largely skipped.
First-order effects
- App developers writing to OpenSocial this week have exactly one distribution path: the invitee containers at Google's event, since no public process exists to become a host.
- Google controls the launch narrative entirely — every 'exciting new application' cited in coverage like the early apps write-up runs only on real estate Google selected.
Second-order effects
- Social networks left off the invite list face a choice between waiting for Google to widen access or building against a rival platform whose host rules they already know, sharpening the Facebook-vs-OpenSocial comparison analysts were already drawing in pieces like What Google OpenSocial really means.
- The missing Container API turns would-be container operators into dependent parties — their participation in the 'open' ecosystem is contingent on Google's discretion rather than conformance to a published spec.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, 'open' platform launches get judged less by the spec they publish than by who may implement it — making partner-selection lists the real gatekeeping mechanism in social-platform competition.
The trend: Platform openness is becoming a two-layer promise — a public API spec layered over privately controlled hosting rights — with Google's OpenSocial launch as an early test case.