The kind of openness promised by OpenSocial isn’t particularly valuable to users (oh that billion people.) Tim O’Reilly nails it with his economic analysis:

If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that’s a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don’t want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.

It’s just an open widget API. Great. So as an app vendor my widget can kind of be portable. Or at least the back end code can kind of be reusable. But users still have no ability to combine the services of multiple vendors. This whole web platform wars thing has got to go.

At a deeper level, think about the value, or lack of value that the platforms actually provide. At the OpenSocial level the platforms are just providing widget containers. Portlets anyone? The Web experience is retrograde enough without taking a giant step backward and spending your whole day inside Facebook.

Rather than trying to suck Google/Yahoo!/Facebook/Microsoft’s sticky-locked-in version of the web through a lame portal straw, the real hope lies in innovative expansion of the browser-to-user link (as exemplified by Mozilla Prism which e.g. lets Web apps work much more like desktop ones) and in secure mashup technologies (like JSONrequest which turns the current platform-centric model on its head.)

update: Prism prototype now available for Mac and Linux.

I just ran across a little tool that solves the first problem in some situations. If you look in the “Goodies” tab on your Google Reader “Settings” page you’ll find a “Subscribe…” bookmarklet in the “Subscribe as you surf” section. Drag that to your bookmarks toolbar folder. When you’re on a page that indicates it’s got an RSS feed, you can click that bookmarklet and it’ll add the feed directly to Google Reader for you — no extra hop through the “Google Homepage vs. Google Reader” page required. Here, I’ve duplicated the bookmarklet for you — just use this one if you like: Subscribe…. And as usual, if you’re reading this in Google Reader the previous bookmarklet will have been neutered so you’ll need to either go to the Google Reader page just cited or toodle on over to memerocket.com for the real thing.

An issue to be aware of is that by using the bookmarklet instead of the built in (e.g. Firefox 2.0) browser subscription mechanism, if the page offers more than one feed you’re always gonna get the first — you won’t get a choice of which one to subscribe to.

On to the second issue (no streamlined way to tag the newly added feed). Well I’ve been asleep at the switch. I’ve got egg on my face. Apparently, about seven days ago, the Google Reader Engineers added a “Feed actions…” drop-down menu (upper right when you’re reading a feed) that you can use to assign tags=folders to your feed.

This last bit is the most recent refrain of a recurring theme. It goes like this: Bill finds an annoyance in a Google product, Bill goes off and does other things for a short while, Bill notices that the evil mind-reading-time-traveling Google engineers have fixed the problem. These people are scary.

PS in the process of writing this post, the theme repeated again — I noticed Google Groups got a significant facelift and now it looks a lot more like Gmail. It didn’t look that way yesterday. Hold up — this is Google Groups Beta I’m looking at. Why am I always the last to know? Those Google engineers smell different.