After attending The Future of Web Apps conference in Miami, I came away with the idea that the future is wide open. There is a movement afoot that aims to open up the information contained within the myriad of social networking sites sprinkled throughout the internet.Central to this idea is the concept of OpenID, which allows for one set of data (name, location, likes, friends, etc.) to be stored in one place - to be accessible by any site that the user wishes. This means that once you have set up your OpenID, you will never have to worry about filling in another set of online forms, all you would have to submit is your OpenID and the rest would be filled in. Importantly, this means that you won't have to go searching for your friends each time, they would already be filled in on your OpenID page and the particular app can crawl the site looking for who is signed up.
This also makes it easy to stay current, any changes or updates made to your OpenID would be pushed to all the sites which you have authorized to access this information.
Google has embraced this idea of openness and has released an API kown as OpenSocial which will help facilitate the adoption of these open standards.
