• The legacy API is officially deprecated as of today, September 14th.
• For three months, the legacy API will continue in its current state.
• On or around December 14th, any new gadget submissions to the iGoogle directory must be using the gadgets.*, in order to be accepted, but existing gadgets may continue to use the legacy API.
• On the same date, the remaining inlined gadgets will be disabled.
• Finally, one year after deprecation, September 14th, 2010, gadgets using the legacy API will cease to function on iGoogle, and the majority of other Google-owned gadget containers (such as orkut, Gmail, and Calendar).
• Reminders will be posted when these important dates approach.

• The legacy API is officially deprecated as of today, September 14th.
• For three months, the legacy API will continue in its current state.
• On or around December 14th, any new gadget submissions to the iGoogle directory must be using the gadgets.*, in order to be accepted, but existing gadgets may continue to use the legacy API.
• On the same date, the remaining inlined gadgets will be disabled.
• Finally, one year after deprecation, September 14th, 2010, gadgets using the legacy API will cease to function on iGoogle, and the majority of other Google-owned gadget containers (such as orkut, Gmail, and Calendar).
• Reminders will be posted when these important dates approach.

1. An iGoogle page is personal, and not shared with other users. In OpenSocial terms, this means that VIEWER and OWNER are always the same person.
2. Friendship between two users may be non-mutual. This allows developers to use a "following" model in their applications. For cases where it's important to verify mutual friendship (sharing private data, for instance), developers can use the isFriendsWith filter when requesting the user's mutual friends.
3. iGoogle has users without canvas view, with canvas view but without social, and with social, all at the same time. And, some users sign in to use iGoogle while others remain signed out. Developers should make sure their gadgets work gracefully across feature sets so that users always have the optimal experience. This blog post provides more details and an example gadget for checking different cases.
4. iGoogle supports organic growth of applications with two mechanisms.
   • Application sharing (via requestShareApp), allows developers to reach a wider audience by encouraging users to engage their friends inside of a given application. By default, requestShareApp will list all of the user's Friends and users can auto invite new friends by email. iGoogle will email recipients without iGoogle accounts, or present a notification within the UI to existing iGoogle users to add the gadget and become friends.
   • Updates (via requestCreateActivity), allow developers to call out specific user actions, to share them with a wider audience. There is a current limit of 3 updates per user, per app, per day, which may be increased in the future.

1. The user is in a domain without canvas view.
   All gadgets that take advantage of canvas view should also be prepared to support those domains for which canvas view is not available. To confirm that a canvas view is available, you can insert a Content section without a view specified, as outlined in this blog post. If your gadget does not support a home view only environment, we suggest telling the user "This gadget requires a feature that is not available in your locale at this time. Please check back at a later date." For more on views, check out the iGoogle Developer Guide.


2. The user is in a domain where OpenSocial is not available.
   If a user is in a domain where canvas view is available a good next step is to test whether that domain has access to OpenSocial functionality. A gadget can determine if the user is on an OpenSocial supported domain or not by calling gadgets.util.hasFeature('opensocial-0.8'), which will return true if the domain supports OpenSocial. If your gadget requires OpenSocial to operate correctly, we recommend you tell the user "This gadget requires a feature that is not available in your locale at this time. Please check back at a later date."


3. The user is not signed in.
   Remember that a significant portion of iGoogle's users are not signed in and won't have any available social information to draw from. A gadget can determine if the user has signed in or not by making a request for the owner or viewer and checking the ID of the user. A logged out user is considered anonymous, and will have a viewer ID of -1. If your gadget requires access to OpenSocial information in order to operate we suggest you give users the message "This gadget cannot access the information it needs so that you can share or collaborate with friends. Please sign in to enable access." In many cases, of course, gadgets can still function even without social features. In that case - we suggest the message "This gadget lets you share and collaborate with friends on iGoogle. Sign in to use these features."


4. The user has not enabled the gadget's social access.
   After installing a gadget a user will be prompted to enable that gadget to access their friend list and activity stream. If the gadget makes an OpenSocial request for information that the user has not enabled access to, it will fail with error code 403 (FORBIDDEN). If your gadget needs access to one or both of these datasets, we recommend the message "This gadget cannot access the information it needs so that you can share or collaborate with friends. Please adjust the gadget's settings to enable access." Similarly if your gadget can still function without access to these social features we recommend the message "This gadget lets you share and collaborate with friends on iGoogle. Please adjust the gadgets settings to use these features." Remember that all users will see your gadget displayed without social access at least once, so make sure your gadget handles this case gracefully!


5. The user hasn't added any friends.
   Finally remember that most users will begin with no friends on their friends list. If your gadget needs friends in order operate normally, we recommend that you use tell your users "You can use this gadget to share and collaborate with friends on iGoogle. Share with friends." where you can link "share with friends" to the requestShareApp call, which allows users to simultaneously add friends and invite them to add your gadget.

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
  // js code goes here...
// -->
</script>

var req = opensocial.newDataRequest();
req.add(req.newFetchPeopleRequest("VIEWER_FRIENDS"), "friends");
req.send(response);

function response(data) {
  var friends = data.get("friends").getData();
  friends.each(function(person) {
    if (person.getId()) {
      alert(person.getDisplayName() + " is a mutual friend.");
    } else {
      alert(person.getDisplayName() + " hasn't put you in their \"Friends\" group."); 
    }
  });
};

• Request the OWNER
• Request a user by ID
• Request the owner's friends
• Request friends of a user with a given ID

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Module>
 <ModulePrefs title="Backwards Compatibility">
 </ModulePrefs>
<Content type="html">
 <![CDATA[
   Users without access to canvas view see this.
 ]]>
</Content>
<Content type="html" view="home">
 <![CDATA[
   Users with canvas view see this in the "home" view.
 ]]>
</Content>
<Content type="html" view="canvas">
 <![CDATA[
   Users with canvas view see this in the "canvas" view.
 ]]>
</Content>
</Module>

• Existing _IG_ calls will continue to work normally, including all IG calls used to fetch remote content
• The new gadgets feature 'views', gadgets.view and requestNavigateTo will be added to your repertoire of valid function calls
• Declaring view="home,canvas" will become valid
• The rest of the gadgets.* and opensocial.* APIs will not yet work. For example, all user customizations and data should be handled via user prefs and not app data for the time being

require feature="opensocial-X"/>" as gadgets that use gadgets.* and opensocial.* will not work in production until later this summer. Note that the sandbox will continue to support these features so that you can work on social features and gadgets in parallel and have all tools available to you.

Thanks again for all your contributions to iGoogle. If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know in our developer forum.

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<attribute name="navbar.contacts.status_color">#FF8080</attribute>
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• New buttons not yet available for themes

• chat roster not yet themed (please use classic skin for best experience)
• presentation issues with links in IE7
• not yet compatible with IE6 and Safari
• some UI elements are placeholders for now