For more information, please view the show notes.

Note: Bret is also the founder of FriendFeed and was interviewed with his co-founder on ReadWriteTalk.

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"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 that aren’t just the demographic that Facebook already has. One of the reasons that Facebook got a lot of attention is that it has moved into the university educated people working for U.S. corporations’ demographic very strongly which makes sense given its roots. So those of us who work in the industry are suddenly aware of it, but there have been social networks out there for 10 years or more who have been gathering users and clustering in different places, and this is just the one that surfaced within our homophylic demographic so there’s a wider world out there with just Facebook, and that’s the key thing to think about when doing this."

Of course, one of the biggest issues around OpenSocial is just how ready the set of APIs is for public consumption. We pressed Marks on this point, but he was vague and wouldn't commit to classifying the project as alpha-level, beta, or anything else. He would only say that there are already public containers up on Orkut, hi5, Ning and Plaxo that developers can interact with, and that another release of OpenSocial is coming in the next few weeks.

We invite you to decide the status of the OpenSocial project in our poll below, and also to listen to the entire podcast (transcript included) that includes a fascinating discussion of the activity streams API, which we think has been talked about less than the rest of OpenSocial's components.