OMA and OpenSocial Foundation are jointly announcing the release of their respective latest social web specifications after having worked collaboratively over the past two years.  The OMA Social Network Web (SNeW) Enabler for federating social networks references OpenSocial specifications as part of the OMA SNeW V1.0 release. These specifications allow mobile operators to offer users an enhanced, “federated” social networking experience.

The Web is becoming increasingly social and social networking itself is heavily fragmented due to the multitude of disparate services that are popular among users. The existing hundreds of social network sites available on the Internet are based on isolated systems and work standalone, implementing a “walled garden” approach. Users on one social network cannot easily interact with users on another social network and people will often have to sign up for an account on multiple social networks to keep in touch with different groups of friends.  Federated social networking, on the other hand, offers users the ability to interact across social networks in an integrated fashion.

The OMA SNeW Enabler allows large-scale deployment and interoperability of SNeW clients and SNeW servers in a timely manner, further guaranteeing social network federation, so that users can easily communicate with users on other social networks using their mobile number as well as migrate their data across providers.

“For the mobile industry, there is an opportunity to leverage operator assets to enable social network interactions across operators and across multiple social networks all within one application,” said Francesco Vadalà, OMA Technical Plenary Chair.  “Federation of social networks is the future of the Social Web that will create new business opportunities based on interoperable communities of all kinds. OMA has captured this trend, and with the SNeW Enabler, has brought it to the mobile world.”

OpenSocial 2.5.1 release, improves the REST API, specifically the Person and Activity Stream services. These and other enhancements to the OpenSocial specification ensure interoperability with the Open Mobile Alliance SNeW Enabler.

OpenSocial 2.5.1 adds in new features that were previously in incubation, such as the Common Container, which formalizes the APIs for application lifecycle and management, as well as adds new capabilities such as the ability to introspect the services with an OpenSocial platform through a metadata API.

“OpenSocial provides the leading and most mature standards based component model for SaaS delivered social business applications,” said John Mertic, President of the OpenSocial Foundation. “Version 2.5 continues to set the benchmark for community driven innovation and fosters interoperability, choice, consistency, innovation, and quality between social platforms and 3rd party applications.”