Marc Canter Speaks Out and Loud About OpenSocial! (Were You Surprised?)
by Kara Swisher
Posted on November 6, 2007 at 12:02 AM PT
On the day that Google announced its roping of MySpace and Bebo into its not-Facebook coalition of companies that were united behind its OpenSocial play to make social-networking programming open and ubiquitous, I had a long-planned lunch date with colorful Web entrepreneur Marc Canter.
How perfect! Canter has been a nettlesome presence of late on the Web 2.0 scene, with his longtime effort to pester all these social-networking platforms to interoperate and open their social graphs. His mantra: “Bringing social to software.”
And OpenSocial obviously soothed the savage beast, as you will see in the video interview I did with him below.
The tech specs for the project once called Maka-Maka (we like that name a lot better) allows for the creation of Web-based applications that can be written to work across a lot of different social-networking sites.
At the beginning of a press conference on the initiative last week, the Google PR person asked the press to wait to start until the “gang” was assembled–a group that included Google and MySpace execs–a faux pas that was inadvertent but completely apt.
But Canter doesn’t care if it’s a rumble or not, as long as it moves the needle forward on opening up platforms.
He has self-interest, of course, since such a development would help his company, PeopleAggregator. But for all his well-known bluster, which includes yelling out questions from tables at industry dinners (and where I jokingly once suggested Tasering him), I do think Marc’s often-annoying harangues are sincere and entirely correct for consumers.
Why shouldn’t you easily be able to move your information anywhere you like and at anytime you want?
It’s nice to let Canter speak a bit. In this case–but not always, Marc, so simmer down!–he kind of deserves the stage on this topic.
Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.
