Google saw a problem with the way social networks were going, according to Joe Kraus, Director of Product Management, and OpenSocial was its way of overcoming it. Till now, to get an application to run on all the diferent social networks a developer had to customize their application for each one. 'When your 'development team' is just one or two people,' notes Kraus, 'the proliferation of APIs forces you to make tough choices, because you can't do that much one-off work.'