There's no denying that the web enables communication. The killer apps of the web -- email, instant messaging, blogging -- have enabled us to communicate with our friends, family, and the rest of the world on a large scale. But there is a newer characteristic of the web that has been emerging: to become social. The first wave of killer apps allowed us to communicate with the world at scale. The next wave is about connecting us and our online activities with our friends.

Social networks have seen that next wave, and have started opening up developer APIs to enable third-party innovation on their websites. This is a great thing, but it has also led to a growing number of APIs which a developer must learn. So we took a look at the state of the web and asked how we could make development easier for both websites and developers. Out of that exercise came OpenSocial.