Congratulations to Google for leading the way toward an open social web — and away from the Balkanization of many different little social web operating systems!

Also, congratulations to Joseph and Cam of Plaxo for being the very first to implement support for the new OpenSocial APIs in a live social network! And thanks to the RockYou team for all the help in making that stuff ready to go live before anyone else.

I just added the first OpenSocial app to my Dynamic Profile in Pulse. But you don’t need to join Plaxo to see it. Why? considering Pulse is a truly open social network. The users own their own personal info and subject matter, control who can see it, and have the freedom to take it with them wherever they want. So here’s my personal lifestreaming widget:

The emoticon post came from a RockYou app written to the new OpenSocial API. I added the app to my professional profile in Pulse. soon after I changed my status to “happy” and the new emoticon showed up on my profile — and in my Pulse stream for all my business network connections to see. And, that ended up in my lifestream, which you see above in the widget.

This is an historic moment. Let the open social web innovation start!

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

Update:

We have temporarily taken down that app, due to some bugs discovered today. We apologize for the inconvenience. We are at the early phase of that, so expect some ups and downs…Your patience appreciated.

Orginal post by john