Almost four months after Google emerged from the background in social networking with its OpenSocial initiative, there is no shortage of skepticism around the project.

The initiative, which will develop a common set of APIs, has the goal of making life easier for developers by simplifying the porting of applications to different social networks. But some see OpenSocial as an attempt to undercut the momentum of rival Facebook and its successful application development program, launched in May of last year. Others are unimpressed with OpenSocial's technology architecture, saying it's too weak for creating truly sophisticated applications.

Still, while Facebook hasn't supported it yet, other big guns in the social-networking market are backing it, including MySpace, LinkedIn, and Bebo, and even major enterprise application players like Oracle and Salesforce.com.

IDG News Service recently chatted with Google Engineering Director David Glazer about various OpenSocial topics, such as the dangers of partners splintering it with proprietary extensions and Facebook's lack of support. An edited version of the interview follows.

IDGNS: Some key components to OpenSocial are in different stages of readiness. The API itself is in version 0.7, which you feel confident developers can start using to build real applications that can be deployed in production.

Glazer: Yes, when we announced the initial API we said: "Here's a start. Give us feedback." [After two more versions] they said: "Yes, we can build great apps with this. There are a lot more things we might ask you to do someday, but we can build a great app today." So we shipped it.

IDGNS: You also have a server-side REST [Representational State Transfer] component that's still not ready, right?

Glazer: When we announced OpenSocial, we said that we could provide interfaces for building applications with client-side code and also apps that let your servers get information from site servers. We got a lot of interest and traction in the client-side thing. People said they were interested in the server-side option also but that they weren't locked on it, that they didn't need it to build a great application. They said it's something they'll take advantage of when it's available. With that, we put all our energy into what the app developers were telling us were critical [components.]

IDGNS: There are other complementary OpenSocial projects, such as the Caja Javascript sanitizer. What's Caja's status?

Glazer: That's ready for developers to start kicking the tires and giving us feedback on. We want to do a very open and a very carefully timed rollout of it. It's protection technology, and we want to be sure it's appropriately safe.

IDGNS: Could you explain Shindig?

Glazer: That's the open-source reference implementation of the OpenSocial API. It's being done -- governed and run and implemented -- entirely as an Apache Software Foundation project. This means individuals commit code with permission of their companies to open the license on any IP that's contributed.

Shindig's mission is to make it really easy to implement OpenSocial support on your site. The goal is that your development team takes Shindig and has a proof of concept up and running in hours, not months. Shindig is making great strides in that direction. There are big pieces of the spec now that are plug-it-in-and-run, and that'll be ongoing.

There's no requirement that somebody uses Shindig to implement OpenSocial. The API can be implemented in many different ways, and Shindig is one easy way to do so.

IDGNS: How much liberty will Google give the participating Web sites to add extensions to their OpenSocial implementations?

Glazer: The short answer is: no gratuitous differences. That means it's essential that everyone implementing OpenSocial be able to extend it to take advantage of their site's unique capabilities. It's also essential that if I'm a developer building an application that does the same thing on three different sites, I should do it the same way.

So we're working hard with [Web site partners] to say: Where you support something for which there's a standard mechanism, use the standard mechanism. Where you want to support something that isn't part of the standard, please do so, and here's a standard extension mechanism that we built in so you can easily add your unique capabilities in a discoverable and testable way by developers.

IDGNS: Is there an OpenSocial certification, so that if a Web site partner strays too far with its extensions, Google can force them to scale things back or else lose the seal?

Glazer: We've asked ourselves that, but so far, our interests are so aligned that we haven't come close to having to do anything that black-and-white. The people that [such a problem] will hurt first and most are application developers, and they will raise an outcry and we'll say: "Okay, what can we jointly do to bring a little bit of order back to this world?" But so far, that hasn't been a concern.

IDGNS: Some complain OpenSocial aims to be such a baseline standard that it will only allow developers to write simple widgets and gadgets.

Glazer: There is some confusion about what piece of the problem OpenSocial is trying to solve. Also, there's a false reasoning that what I see today is all I will ever see.

First, the word "gadget" has a bunch of connotations, not all accurate. One is that it's something 100-by-200 pixels in a little box on a page. There are implementations of gadgets like that out there, but that's not true for how OpenSocial supports application builders. OpenSocial has built into it the concept of "views," which lets you say: "Here's how my application looks if you give me a little rectangle and if you give me a full page, and here's how I can navigate between different views of my application."

The second thing is OpenSocial isn't trying to boil the ocean. Our overall goal is to help the Web become more social more quickly. There's a whole bunch of things we can do to help the Web become more social, and OpenSocial was the first and biggest place where we saw an opportunity. OpenSocial isn't meant to be a panacea, nor to do everything for everyone. It's meant to move the world forward and to solve a very specific problem: Help developers build an application that can run on any social site that wants to support OpenSocial.

At the same time, the proof is going to be the application, and if it turns out this round of OpenSocial provides good applications and we want to get to stellar applications, we'll enhance it.

IDGNS: There has also been talk of whether OpenSocial should address data portability. What's Google's latest position on that?

Glazer: [Data portability and standard social-application-development APIs] are parallel issues that are both interesting and can both be addressed, but they don't have to be coupled. We thought about where we can help things move forward quickest and decided it best to separate these two things.

IDGNS: How important is it, or not, to have Facebook on board with OpenSocial?

Glazer: That's up to users and developers to answer. The benefit of a standard is it helps people reach more users more quickly, and we welcome anyone who chooses to implement the standard if it makes sense for them. The nature of the Web is a playing field that tilts towards openness and interoperability, and it's great anytime anyone makes a move towards open interoperable applications in the world of social [applications], but everyone should make their own decisions and do what's right for their business.

IDGNS: Yet today, Facebook is probably the most attractive platform for this type of application.

Glazer: Moving from a world in which you have 12 different ways to build an application to a world in which you have six and then two and then one, every one of those steps makes things better.

IDGNS: You recently announced that Orkut's OpenSocial container is ready and that you'll soon begin making OpenSocial applications available for Orkut users. Is that correct?

Glazer: Yes, the Orkut sandbox, which is the developer limited-access site, is running the launch version of the API, and there's a whole community of developers building applications for it right now. We're on the countdown to opening that up to consumers.

IDGNS: What's the next big OpenSocial milestone or announcement we should be looking out for?

Glazer: There's a set of launch milestones. As Orkut, MySpace, Hi5, and others that have announced imminent plans open the doors of their OpenSocial applications to consumers, there'll be a wave of those. The next step will be watching the interaction between users and developers on these different sites: Seeing what kinds of feedback they get from users, seeing developers come up with new creative ideas, and seeing the sites work to enable that. That's what we're looking forward to: Opening the doors and watching the party get started.

Microsoft made a mountainous down payment on its high-profile pledge Thursday to improve interoperability and warm up its relationship with the open source community, releasing some 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols. After digesting the news and at least some of the documentation, the reaction within the open source community was varied, ranging from cautious praise to outright scorn.

"Our initial reaction was, 'Wow, great'," said Dominic Sartorio, president of the Open Solutions Alliance, an advocacy group backed by open source vendors. "Now, 24 hours later, we've had a chance to look at it a bit more."

Microsoft's plans are "certainly not a fundamental change," Sartorio said. "They're not relinquishing patents, not open-sourcing code."

However, the value of even this incremental move will be substantial, Sartorio predicted. "Customers have been demanding interoperability between Microsoft and open source for a long time," he said. Systems integrators and other third parties will now "create this groundswell of interoperability," he said.

Other open source players didn't take as long to reach a similar conclusion.

"The uncertainty and lack of information around Microsoft specifications has hindered the development of open source solutions which leverage that technology," wrote Andi Gutmans, co-founder of Zend, maker of an open source Web development platform and a Microsoft partner, in a blog post Thursday. "Microsoft is now enabling the open source community to grow its contributor base around such technologies and significantly improve the delivered quality. As most open source developers and users live in heterogeneous environments, this will benefit many."

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, was slightly less effusive in a prepared statement, also issued Thursday, but hardly negative.

"As Linux use continues to rise, so does the demand for customers to enable it to interoperate with Microsoft products. This announcement by Microsoft seems to indicate they want to participate in that march," it read in part.

Red Hat weighed in with heard-it-before skepticism.

"We've heard similar announcements before, almost always strategically timed for other effect. Red Hat regards this most recent announcement with a healthy dose of skepticism," said Michael Cunningham, executive vice president and general counsel of Red Hat, in a blog posting on Thursday.

Andy Updegrove, an attorney with Gesmer Updegrove in Boston and an advocate for the Open Document Format (ODF), a rival to Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) format, offered measured praise to Microsoft. But echoing many others, he also suggested the company's announcement had an underlying agenda.

"I expect that there is no coincidence that this announcement comes just two business days (and only one, for most of the world) before the Ballot Resolution Meeting convenes in Geneva next Monday," he said in an e-mail Thursday, referring to Microsoft's ongoing attempt to get OOXML recognized as a standard. "This will effectively give those participating in the discussions of Microsoft's OOXML document format no opportunity to fully understand what Microsoft has actually promised to do, while reaping the maximum public relations benefit."

Ultimately, Updegrove contended, the announcement stems from the effect of "multiple market forces" on Microsoft, from antitrust investigations to competition from rival vendors pushing alternative software offerings. "Taken together, these forces are pushing and pulling Microsoft in a direction that it would have been highly unlikely to travel otherwise."

Microsoft's decisions are always pragmatic, and rumors of its impending demise are greatly exaggerated, suggested John Rymer, an analyst with Forrester Research, in an interview Friday.

"They've made an accommodation. They've accommodated the market. Microsoft has always followed the market," he said. "Does this mean that the giant has fallen? That's a bit much. That's grandstanding, or fun talk over a beer."

Sartorio echoed Rymer: "They are not doing this to score popularity points. Customers are demanding it. It's not just the source code being open; customers just want more transparent styles of interacting with their vendors."

The major advantage now is that the question of Microsoft's transparency can be put to a legitimate test, and not simply be caught up in a never-ending maelstrom of opinion or perspective, said James Governor, an analyst with RedMonk.

"I agree with some that Microsoft has made big 'interop' announcements before, but never with anywhere near this level of clarity around the specifics," Governor said by e-mail Friday. "Clear public principles and policies is a lot better than FUD and innuendo. Public policies will help to define Microsoft's actions, and give us a way to measure its behaviour, and if necessary, censure it."

Shedding new light on the company's Silverlight 2 browser plug-in technology, a Microsoft official wrote a blog post Friday morning that emphasized RIA (rich Internet application) development capabilities planned for an upcoming beta release.

Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, general manager in the Microsoft Developer Division, provided a list of features planned for Silverlight 2 and the beta in his blog. A Microsoft representative subsequently described the blog as the most detail provided to date on Silverlight 2.

With the Silverlight platform, Microsoft is expected to battle Adobe and its popular Flash technology in the RIA space. Microsoft's Mix08 conference in Las Vegas in two weeks seems like the obvious place to introduce the beta as Silverlight was the star attraction at the Mix07 conference last year. The Microsoft representative would not comment on whether this would actually be the case but did acknowledge plans to ship the beta during the first quarter of this year.?

Featured in version 2 is a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .Net Framework, Guthrie said. Developers can write Silverlight applications using a .Net language, such as Visual Basic, C#, JavaScript, IronPython, or IronRuby. Microsoft plans to ship support for developer/designer workflow and integration for Silverlight in its Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio tools.

The introduction of Silverlight 2, which had previously been named Silverlight 1.1, is critical to Microsoft as it battles Adobe, an analyst stressed.

"That's the one that uses the .Net Framework for programming so it can leverage all of Microsoft's developer tools," said analyst Rob Helm of Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm. "Developer tools could become Microsoft's secret weapon," since many developers already are familiar with Visual Studio and .Net Framework, he said.

The 1.0 version of Silverlight has been more geared to video, while Silverlight 2 adds .Net development and transactional capabilities. To bolster RIA development, the Beta 1 release will include a Windows Presentation Foundation UI framework for building rich Web applications. It offers a "powerful" graphics and animation engine plus support for higher-level capabilities, such as controls, layout management, data-binding, and template skinning, Guthrie said.

The Beta 1 release is 4.3 MB in size.

"Once Silverlight 2 is installed, you can browse the Web and automatically run rich Silverlight applications within your browser of choice," Guthrie said. This includes such browsers as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and others.

Rich controls in the Silverlight 2 beta include core form controls, such as TextBox and RadioButton. Built-in layout management panels, such as Grid and Panel, are offered as well. Functionality controls like Calender and DatePicker as well as data manipulation controls also are part of the beta. "The built-in controls support a rich control templating model, which enables developers and designers to collaborate together to build highly polished solutions," Guthrie said.

For networking, Silverlight 2 backs REST (Representational State Transfer), WS-*, and SOAP as well RSS, POX, and HTTP services. Cross-domain network access in Silverlight 2 enables Silverlight clients to directly access resources and data from resources on the Web. Built-in sockets networking also is included in the beta release.

Silverlight 2 features a rich .Net base class library of functionality, such as collections, generics threading, globalization, XML, and local storage. Rich APIs in the product enable HTML DOM/JavaScript integration with .Net code

Also featured is Microsoft's LINQ (Language Integrated Query) technology, which provides native query syntax for C# and Visual Basic, and LINQ to XML library support. This enables easy transformation and querying of data, Guthrie said. Local data caching and storage support are highlighted as well in Silverlight 2.

Net APIs in Silverlight "are a compatible subset of the full .Net Framework," Guthrie said.

"Silverlight 2 does not require the .Net Framework to be installed on a computer in order to run. The Silverlight setup download includes everything necessary to enable all the above features (and more we'll be talking about shortly) on a vanilla Mac OSX or Windows machine," Guthrie said.

Silverlight 2 applications can be migrated to become a desktop application using Windows Presentation Foundation and the full .Net framework.

U.S. and European authorities seized thousands of pieces of counterfeit computer hardware in a major operation in November and December, they announced Friday.

About 360,000 items, mostly computer networking hardware and integrated circuits, were seized by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency and the European Commission Taxation and Customs Union Directorate General, the agencies said.

The raids were part of "Operation Infrastructure," aimed at fighting piracy and preventing the spread of counterfeit chips.

Counterfeit semiconductors and integrated chips have many potential safety ramifications because they could be used in automobiles, medical equipment, and aircraft, said Daryl Hatano, senior vice president of public policy at the Semiconductor Industry Association. Effective anticounterfeiting measures ensure that electronics contain genuine semiconductors and deliver full performance and reliability, Hatano said. Counterfeit chips also bite into sales of hardware companies selling genuine chips.

Companies and consumers need to take steps to avoid becoming counterfeiting victims, he said.

For U.S. Customs to identify counterfeit chips, products need to be registered with U.S. Customs and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Hatano said.

Consumers focused more on price could be fooled into buying products with fake semiconductors, Hatano said. Consumers should also return products that don't work properly so companies can identify counterfeit chips and work with the government and industry to nab counterfeiters.

A common counterfeiting practice is re-marking of chips, in which counterfeiters replace the label with a different brand name and different part number, Hatano said. The chip might work in equipment but may not have been tested for speed, and the part number might not have been checked, which can lead to equipment failure.

The U.S. and EU said last year that they would establish the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement to encourage countries to follow intellectual property rights established by the World Trade Organization and other global trade groups. The agreement focuses on improved international cooperation, best practices, and the establishment of a legal framework to tackle counterfeiting and protect IP rights.

More than 130 million counterfeit items were seized in 2006, according to a study released by the European Commission last year.

Neither U.S. Customs nor EC officials responded to messages for additional comment about the raids.

Although Microsoft has yet to fix an update that sent some Windows Vista machines into endless reboots, it spelled out on Friday several workarounds users can apply to regain control of those PCs.

Last week's update -- actually a pair of prerequisite files that modify Vista's install components to prep the operating system for SP1 (Service Pack 1) -- caused some systems to reboot over and over, while others simply balked at booting. On Tuesday, Microsoft reacted to a flood of reports on its support forums by pulling the files from Windows Update until it could determine what went awry.

Although some users managed to stop the rebooting on their own or with help from others posting messages to a Microsoft support newsgroup, Microsoft was officially mum on a fix or workaround until Friday.

The KB949358 support document confirmed what users had been reporting for more than a week.

"When you try to install an update from Windows Update on a computer that is running Windows Vista, you may receive the following message: 'configuring updates stage 3 of 3. 0% complete'," it read. "After you receive this message, the computer reverts to the screen that displays the same message. Additionally, the update is not installed successfully, and the computer restarts."

The document also gave users three ways to stop the rebooting and take back control of their PCs. It suggested that they try them in this order:

* Start Windows Vista by using the Windows installation media, and then select the "Repair your computer" option; * Start the computer in Safe Mode, and then use the Repair or System Restore feature; * Rename the "Pending.xml" file, and then edit the registry.

Most, though not all, users who had tried these earlier -- other users suggested the trio on the newsgroup days before Microsoft put its stamp on the fixes -- had reported they'd reclaimed use of their PCs.

Some wags on the support newsgroup, meanwhile, have dubbed the snafu "Microsoft's St. Valentine's Day Vista Massacre," a nod to the day when reports first filled the forum. Many of them also complained of poor-quality advice from Microsoft's phone support representatives but said that they'd managed to recover their machines using one of the three fixes the company outlined Friday.

"I received this update on Feb. 14, and it killed Vista," wrote a user identified as D Clarke on Thursday. "I spent most of two days on the phone with a Microsoft guy from India named 'Steve.'"

Rather than wait for the Microsoft rep to call him back, however, Clarke tried the "Repair your computer" option, the first one outlined in the support document posted Friday.

While a patched update isn't yet available, Microsoft remained confident that the delay would not ruin its release plans for SP1. "This will not affect the SP1 release schedule," a company spokeswoman said Thursday. "We are on schedule to release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update and the download center in mid-March and to users using Automatic Update in mid-April."