DISQUS

It's interesting the people are in the habit of leaving all those boxes checked when adding an application, effectively granting it access to act on their behalf.

I like to try out interesting applications, but my default is always to check just two boxes: the first 'Access my information' (because it's required - this is another pet peeve) and the third 'add to my left-hand links'.

With profile boxes and newsfeed stories, an application can shape people's impressions of you. Why grant that up front before you've even given an application a test spin?

I'd like a "no more newsfeed stories about this friend" kind of option", to go along with the "no more application invites from this friend"

A social network is just a set of associations between users. Google doesn't need to 'add' anything special to App Engine to create that capability. Any application with its own data store can store any associations it likes, between any pair of objects it likes.

App Engine is a hosting platform for developers. Why would it need its own social network? It can tie into all of the social networks that already exist. Orkut already has its own api, just like all the rest of the OpenSocial containers. If you want to build an Orkut application in App Engine, you can include a python Orkut library to ease the task.

The only thing Google could do to make this even easier would be to bundle an Orkut library into the standard App Engine API like they do for the Google Accounts.

Letting people associate with the network they consider themselves to be a part of seems like the best approach...