During this week's Google I/O conference of developers, AOL publicly declared their love of OpenSocial as they announced their future support of OpenSocial with AOL services. The first integration point will be seen during the next "few months" at myAOL.com, where Google's Gadgets will soon be available. That is only the beginning, though, as OpenSocial support is planned for "all AOL products and platforms."
Eric Staats, Principal Software Engineer at AOL, made a post summarizing the move at the Google OpenSocial blog today:
As I discussed in my presentation, adopting Gadgets as our widget format within myAOL is the first step in adopting OpenSocial across AOL products and services. Gadgets will allow us to offer developers more opportunities to bring their ideas to myAOL, while keeping our users safer. Additionally, Gadgets will make it easier for application developers to create new tools and widgets for myAOL that will also be available to AOL users across the web at large on any OpenSocial enabled container.
On a topic only tangentially related to this, Jerry Yang and Sue Decker were interviewed by Walt Mossberg today. The general concensus from the analysts on Yahoo, particularly recently, is that they're a shiftless company with no clear focus, something that was made quite clear in the interview today when Yang made it quite clear that he knew that Yahoo had a desparate need to focus on something, but couldn't quite pin down for Walt what it was they were going to be focusing on.
AOL has suffered similarly, acquiring and developing all sorts of neat utilities over the years, but never bringing much of that technology together in any sort of cohesive strategy. Certainly they're starting to do something with their advertising properties, but in the world of video and other forms of multimedia, they're quite often competing with themselves, instead of trying to bring their properties into some sort of harmony with one another.