Open social versus closed journalism
There is nothing sinister whatsoever about Open Social. It was developed collaboratively by a wide cross section of the industry. Its licensing is open, and it costs nothing to use or implement. This is no different to how any other open standard works. Often a large player like Google needs to put its weight behind standardisation or it simply never happens.
The same happened with Microsoft, IBM and co with XML, the same is happening with Nokia, Sony Ericsson et al with compact memory card specs. The list goes on. It is heartening to see competitors in this industry putting aside their differences and working together to produce standards.
This is nothing like how SNA was developed and licensed by IBM in the bad old days. So I must ask the author if he is criticising the standard because v1.0 is not perfect; or is he just hitching an easy ride on the Google bashing bandwagon?
As the author may or may not be aware, even poorly conceived standards (HTML1.0 for example) can benefit the entire IT industry and ultimately the end user. To me as an Open Social developer, the 1.0 specification is not perfect but is a very good start.