OExchange, an Open Sharing Protocol Supported by Google, Microsoft, Digg and Others

Sharing, be it links, news, files, music, and so on, is central to the web today. And some of the biggest names on the web, Facebook and Twitter, are all about sharing. But the market, though still in its early days, is pretty much cornered by these two services and, while there are plenty of competitors, none of them has the scale or popularity to match them. A new initiative from a number of big players aims to tackle the scale problem with an open sharing protocol that would leverage the field for the smaller websites and services.

“As the web becomes more social, more people want to share information with their friends and colleagues across a wide array of services. While most of these services provide APIs to facilitate sharing, the ever-increasing number of these services with unique APIs makes integration costly for publishers and limits the likelihood that lesser-known services will be supported,” Chris Messina, Open Web advocate at Google, wrote.

“OExchange, a new protocol spearheaded by Clearspring, aims to address this problem by specifying a conventional way for publishers to ‘offer’ links to sharing services, and for sharing services to design their API endpoints,” he announced.

OExchange sits between publishers and aggregators or sharing services and aims to simplify the process of sharing. Publishers would implement OExchange in their site, giving the user more options when it comes to sharing services. If the latter’s preferred service is not on the list, it can be easily added if it supports OExchange.

The Google Buzz API and blogging service Posterous already support OExchange. The project has also gotten some big names like Clearspring, its initiator, Digg, Echo, Instapaper, LinkedIn, Microsoft, PrintFriendly, Springpad, StumbleUpon, Webs.com and yfrog on board. Its initiators have also reached out to Twitter, Yahoo and Facebook. Facebook is very unlikely to join the initiative, but Twitter, though reluctant for now, and Yahoo may, as they have a good-enough track record when it comes to open standards.