Google’s Open Social is a new buzz these days, I can’t wait to see what on earth it look like. During my waiting period I blogged a few of words of my concerns (sorry in Chinese only), I feel "Open Social" is either a hype or a "too good to be true" stuff, because several those "friends" of Google are just head to head competitors.

Finally it was there, I am a little bit disappointed with what I see, the "Open Social" is actually a buzz word combination, I would rather call it’s a  web widget/gadget SDK/API.

How to get start?  Here is what google said:

How do I start?

1. Request access to the Orkut sandbox
2. Check out the OpenSocial API
3. Read about the Anatomy of an Orkut Application

I am disappointed again, first, now only orkut sandbox available as a "container"; second,you even need a request to get that orkut sandbox account, I made a request and so far no response.

Open social is not a open API for social network sites, nor it is a protocol or standard that help social network expose their social meta data, it even don’t try to provide unified identity for users who have many accounts in different networks.

Open social is a "SDK" for social network sites to weapon up and become another "facebook platform", that all.

From the documents and discussion groups, it seemed you have to apply from Google to become a "container" site, what an "open" is if you actually need a boss to approve for that "open"?

Fortunately, there is one, maybe the only one available right now, it’s Plaxo Pulse, you can add a rockyou emote gadget to your plaxo pulse profile page:

If you are a Pulse user, the URL for adding an OpenSocial API is:

http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/gadgets/

The specific URL for the RockYou app is:

http://dev2.rockyou.com/google_apps/emote/emote_xml.php

I wrote a simple test open social application, actually it’s just a copy/paste version from Google’s document for an initial test, when I try to add my application to Plaxo, guess what?

– It need approval! Even for a gadget to add into my own profile need their approval! What kind of "open" it is?!

Maybe too many people were setting too much expectation on this "Open Social", however it looks more like a google’s PR events for the latest "facebook microsoft" deal, unfortunately.

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Just read from a friend’s twitter update that Google.cn has banned a Chinese name "Shijing(石靖)". I tried to search that name in google.cn, here is what I got:

无法访问您所搜索的信息,请返回 google.cn 查询其它信息.

The above Chinese is: "Access denied for the information you are searching, please back to google.cn to search other information".

The name "Shijing" is a very common Chinese name for male or female, maybe in China there are around several hundred thousands of people are named as "Shijing". However, for google China, they not exist any more.

"Shijing" became a popular search keyword in the last couple weeks because someone discovered her naked photo were appeared in an American idiot Robert Kugler’s online photo album. That guy post many Chinese girl’s photo(include some naked) in his myspace pages, and declared that he  had sex with lots of Chinese women and post those photo to show off. All I can say for this is, that stupid guy is a complete idiot, he should pay price for what he did( Publishing private photos to public without permission).

No doubt, it’s because some department of our government’s pressure, generally they just ask a web site to remove any thing they want to remove, they don’t care what they are and how they related to the daily life.

Since Google launched a self censored web site: Google.cn, she was blamed a lot in Chinese "google fans", many people feel they were betrayed or cheated by google’s famous slagon "don’t be evil". As a person who ever ran a web site in China, I am a few of people who support the self censored version google — "google.cn", it’s not possible to fight with a government like China when you decided to do business in China. Open a self censored google.cn is a win-win situation for both google and google users. However those self secorship only related to those political related content and some sexual/pornographic contents.

But this time is complete different, this is the first time google banned a keyword completely (without display anything!), and this keyword is not related to any political terms, it’s just a common name that several hundred thousands of people are sharing! I believe it is so "EVIL" for those people who using this name or they have some relative who using this name.

Goodbye, "don’t be evil", I believe it’s  only a start point that google China become far and far away from what it said before.

(Chinese version: 和谐了的谷歌算Evil呢还是不Evil呢？)

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