I did a little experimentation and you know what?

Unaltered Google gadgets work on all Open Social platforms.

And some big news…
Facebook now supports Open Social (more on this below, including screen shot)

But no matter who supports Open Social, they also do something else…

They support Google gadgets.

Any Google gadget (pretty much) will work in Open Social, to illustrate this lets use a monkey…

The monkey swinging above is a Google gadget, in other words, it is not a “Open Social” gadget.

But the thing is, it works (without any altering of code) on Open Social platforms…

Here is that monkey on Ning…

Ning is the only place so far that has truly live Open Social implementation. In other words, I can link to this one because it is on a live page, accessible by all. For the rest of these examples, it can only be seen by users of the sandbox, so I will just do screen shots.

Here is the monkey on Hi5…

Here is that monkey on Orkut…

and in Orkut, the unaltered code gets read so well that it auto generates the thumbnail image normally only used in the Google gadget directory…

The monkey also swings on Facebook!…

Facebook and Open Social

Okay so now that you see that Google gadgets work everywhere, lets discuss Facebook and the surprisingly quick way they have implemented Open Social. It is done via an application called Opensocket. If you want to learn more about Opensocket, they explain it very well on their blog.

It is an application that displays Open Social gadget on Facebook. It is important to note that it is in Beta, and only a few gadgets are “approved” to be added via OpenSocket. Dan Lester (one of the developers of OpenSocket) was nice enough to add the monkey gadget temporarily so that I could take the above screen shot. Thanks Dan!

To add Open Social gadgets on Facebook just add the OpenSocket App, and choose the gadget you want.

Back to Google Gadgets

The overall point of all of this is that Google gadgets are indeed universal.

They need not be altered to work in Open Social containers or anywhere else. This means that the Google gadget syndication directory is a mighty thing as I discussed in an earlier article. It is essentially a directory now of gadgets that can be added anywhere. Google gadgets are in a sense even more open than Open Social.

While the fact that they work in Open Social containers is no surprise to developers, Google has never explicitly discussed this, and I thought that non-developers could make use of this knowledge.

Google gadgets rock If you want that monkey, it is here.

Related posts:
Ning, Google Gadgets, and Open Social
Google Gadgets get Mashed – FaceBook goes Java
Google I/O Coverage – Part One