ReadWriteWeb

Steve O'Hear (who edits our digital lifestyle blog last100) has an interesting post on his ZDNet blog that questions whether Google's OpenSocial initiative is at all about data portability, or if in fact it really just about widget standardization. O'Hear quotes heavily from a recent article by Marc Canter, who is a strong advocate for open standards and data portability, that ran on CNet.

In mid-december, I interviewed Kevin Marks (Developer Advocate, Google Open Social) on Read/WriteTalk . One of the areas we spent considerable time discussing was Open Social's Activity Streams. Since that interview, I have found myself reflecting a lot about the increasing number of social networks that create 'feeds' around user activity within the site. As someone who has been an avid user of RSS for the past few years and created a product to intelligently filter sets of RSS feeds, it probably isn't surprising this is a trend I'm quite bullish about. I'm certainly not the only one who is finds this development promising.

Following the December announcement that social network Bebo was aligning itself to the Facebook platform, the company announced today that the Bebo Open Application Platform is "100% open" – meaning that any 3rd party developer can deploy their applications on Bebo.

Previously the Bebo platform was only available to a select group of media and developer partners, including NBC Universal, CBS, NBA, Yahoo!, RockYou, Slide, and others. As of now, there are 63 apps in their Developer website - Bebo obviously hopes to ramp this up quickly now that anyone can develop apps.

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), have launched an application development contest on both Google's Open Social and the Facebook Platform. The contest calls for developers to create applications that promote PETA or its campaigns on either of the two platforms. The competition runs through January 25th and the winner receives a $500 Apple gift card.

The OpenSocial team at Google today announced an updated JavaScript API. While the actual content of the update is rather technical, Google engineer Cassie Doll says that it addresses "the most immediate pain points" for developers. But the big albatross around OpenSocial's neck is the question of just what MySpace is going to do.

Over on our network podcast Read/WriteTalk host Sean Ammirati got a chance to sit down with Google Developer Advocate, Kevin Marks. Marks is best known, at least within Google, as one of the main evangelists of the OpenSocial project.

"Consumer apps" is a rather broad topic to tackle, so rather than try to recount everything that has happened across the entire cosmos of consumer web applications in the past year, we'll focus on two areas that have had perhaps the most impact overall in the way we conduct our day-to-day lives: social networking and personal publishing.