Google Data » Dan Peterson, Product Manager

Build OpenSocial Apps for Social Change, Win Prizes

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:15:00 +0000

The Change the Web Challenge invites developers to create widgets and web applications that help people connect to opportunities to make a difference all over the web. It's a contest happening right now with $10,000 in prizes!

The Change the Web Challenge is being run by Social Actions - an aggregator of actions people can take to support causes, nonprofits, and progressive projects from more than forty different sites - like GlobalGiving, Change.org, DonorsChoose.org, Kiva.org, Idealist.org and VolunteerMatch. Social Actions then makes these actions available in a common format and API.

Now we’re looking to get those actions out there on the web sites, blogs and social networks we visit every day.

That's where OpenSocial comes in.

OpenSocial is the key to the social web. By enabling you to build apps that help people connect to actions on the most popular social websites like hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Netlog, Ning, orkut, and Yahoo! - you can help millions of people make a difference!

So the question we want to ask the OpenSocial community is:

What’s your dream idea for an OpenSocial app that helps people engage and interact around ways to take action?

Some ideas that might help get you started:

An app that helps you find and share (and maybe show off) actions on your favorite OpenSocial social network.
An app that enables you and your friends to compete to see who can take the most actions.
An app that displays the hottest actions on your profile for the issues you care about.

Got an idea?

Dig into the Developer Resources
Join Social Actions Developers Google Group
Check out apps already submitted to the Project Gallery

We're also hosting an online chat, OpenSocial for Social Change on Wednesday, March 25th (11am-12pm PST) with guests Dan Peterson (President, OpenSocial Foundation), Jay Parikh (Secretary, OpenSocial Foundation + Senior Vice President of Engineering at Ning) & Maxwell Newbould (Product Developer for MySpace OpenSocial) to explore and brainstorm how OpenSocial's framework and apps can help create a better world. The chat will be open to everyone to participate. Please RSVP here.

Posted by Joe Solomon, Director, Social Actions' Change the Web Challenge

OpenSocial’s birthday wrap-up: it’s good to be one

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:54:00 +0000

A little over a week ago, the OpenSocial Foundation celebrated -- along with 250+ close friends -- the one year anniversary of the introduction of OpenSocial. It was a great opportunity for everyone involved to get together and reflect on the past year, brainstorm about what's in store for the next year, and write a bunch of code.

To wrap things up, there were several good sessions:

OpenSocial State of the Union [ VIDEO | SLIDES ]
OpenSocial 0.9 Preview [ VIDEO | SLIDES ]
Several app developers sharing their experiences and tips
Updates from more than a dozen OpenSocial containers
Demos of tools available that improve the OpenSocial developer experience
Breakout sessions about OpenSocial 0.9, various app architectures, and using OpenSocial "outside" containers
The day after, there was also a well-attended deep dive to discuss the prototypes for OpenSocial 0.9

You can find links to all the videos and presentations on the OpenSocial Birthday agenda, and on the OpenSocial Foundation's new YouTube channel.

One of the most exciting pieces of the event was the realization that developers using OpenSocial can now reach more than 600M users across more than 20 sites -- a number that is ever growing (some highlights are featured in the chart below):

In terms of launches during the event, MySpace launched support for OpenSocial v0.8, Xiaonei launched support for OpenSocial to their 30M users in China, and OpenSocial.org got a fresh new look. In addition, during the past year we've -- collectively -- achieved some other good results:

315M+ app installs
85M+ daily canvas page views
7,500+ applications
20+ live containers

All in all, it was great to get the community together, and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone get involved on the wiki, in the spec list, and building apps. Special thanks to RockYou for helping sponsor the party.

... and yes, we even sang "Happy Birthday" to OpenSocial over cake (check out some of the pics below).

Posted by Dan Peterson, on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation

(Photo credits: Ben Metcalfe)

OpenSocial’s First Birthday: Detailed Agenda — November 13 in San Francisco

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 05:20:00 +0000

As blogged before, next Thursday, November 13, is the official event for OpenSocial's first birthday being hosted by the OpenSocial Foundation at MySpace's SF office (SOMA).

As you can see from the complete agenda, it's filling out to be quite a day. Some of the highlights:

OpenSocial: State of the Union
App Developers sharing their experiences:

PhotoBuzz, RockYou, and PixVerse

OpenSocial 0.9: What does it mean for me?
Demos of Developer Tools:

OpenSocial Dev App, zembly, and iWidgets

"Global Container Crawl" programming contest

How many containers can you get running on?
Engineers from around the world will be on-hand to help
... including: hi5, Hyves, iGoogle, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, orkut, Viadeo, Yahoo!
... among others

Breakout sessions for discussions and prototyping

Since a lot of people will be in town for the birthday event, on Friday, November 14, MySpace SF is also hosting OpenSocial 0.9 Face to Face, so folks have an additional opportunity to get together and discuss spec proposals for 0.9 and prototype on the latest implementations.

For the birthday, please be sure to RSVP -- so we can get enough birthday cake.

Posted by Dan Peterson, on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation

OpenSocial Foundation: The Election Results Are in!

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 03:53:00 +0000

The OpenSocial Foundation community representatives election has concluded. With 311 eligible voters and 213 valid ballots cast, the community has selected Jay Parikh, and Joseph Smarr to serve as the two community representatives for this year's board. Congratulations to Jay and Joseph!

By way of introduction...

A bit about Jay Parikh:

Mr. Parikh is passionate about technology, platforms, and leading innovative product development. Currently, Mr. Parikh is the Senior Vice President of Product Engineering at Ning where he oversees the product development, engineering, and operations teams. This team is responsible for creating and scaling Ning's social networking platform that today powers nearly 500,000 social networks. Prior to joining Ning, Mr. Parikh was the Vice President of Engineering at Akamai Technologies. During his nine years at Akamai, Mr. Parikh led the product engineering teams responsible for many of the distributed delivery and acceleration solutions used by the majority of Akamai’s customers.

A bit about Joseph Smarr:

Joseph Smarr is Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo. He is currently leading Plaxo’s “Open Social Web” initiative to put users back in control of who they know when using socially-enabled sites by using open data-sharing standards. An active participant in the Web 2.0 community, Joseph has built web applications for many years, including Plaxo’s online address book, web widgets, and was architect and lead developer of the Plaxo 3.0 rich AJAX address book, calendar, and sync tool. Joseph has a BS and MS from Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence.

Please also give your regards to the other candidates for their participation in the election and the OpenSocial community.

For those of you looking to get involved with OpenSocial, there are many ways outside the board, including:

wiki.opensocial.org: Contribute to documenting best practices and articles on the new OpenSocial community wiki
Get Started Building Apps: Brainstorm, check out a few tutorials, and get programming
OpenSocial Spec Process: Participate in the on-going evolution of OpenSocial's technical specification

See you on the forums!

Posted by Dan Peterson, on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation

51.com 开放平台 launches OpenSocial to 31M+ unique users

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:01:00 +0000

The 51.com platform team announced that the 51.com Developer Platform launched OpenSocial support on Oct. 18, and successfully ran a live OpenSocial app called Emote developed by RockYou, becoming the first large-scale social networking site in China to successfully do so.

The 51.com Developer Platform currently supports OpenSocial APIs for accessing user and friends' profile info and enables application development using the OpenSocial 0.7 JavaScript API. 51.com plans to continue adding features to their OpenSocial platform, starting with support for the REST and RPC protocols, as defined in OpenSocial 0.8.1.

For those interested in developing OpenSocial applications, you may implement your creative ideas on the 51.com Developer Platform, gaining instant access to 31.5 million active users on 51.com.

To learn more about OpenSocial application development on 51.com, go to the OpenSocial developer community on the 51.com Developer Platform.

51.com provides social networking services to Chinese users worldwide. It is the fastest growing social network in China and has consistently taken a leadership role in providing products and services and advancing related technologies in the social networking industry.

51.com currently has 130 million registered user accounts with an active user base of 31.5 million, concurrent online users of nearly 1.1M, and average daily page views of more than 300 million. Users spend an average of 41 minutes each session on 51.com and upload 10 million photos, write 3 million blogs, and listen to 35 million songs daily.

Posted by Changyong Zhang (张长永), Product Manager, 51.com

LinkedIn Launched InApps Platform with OpenSocial

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 03:19:00 +0000

I’m happy to report that LinkedIn just launched their Intelligent Applications Platform (InApps), built using the OpenSocial 0.8 specification. This initial release features a healthy set of productivity applications, which provide new avenues for collaboration across the 30 million users on LinkedIn. It's exciting to see LinkedIn paving the way for a whole new type of OpenSocial applications, and thus expanding OpenSocial into the professional context.

The apps available today come from companies such as Amazon, TripIt, SlideShare, and Google. You can start using the applications by visiting the LinkedIn Application Directory. LinkedIn works closely with each developer to ensure a good user experience and chooses partners based on the professional utility of applications, the quality of technology and content, and the integrity of the company’s privacy practices.

For those interested in building applications on LinkedIn, there is a lot of good news:

As part of OpenSocial 0.8, LinkedIn deployed a REST endpoint with OAuth support
There are unique monetization opportunities for apps built for LinkedIn
LinkedIn is offering support for all of the "viral" messaging channels defined in OpenSocial:
- requestSendMessage
- requestShareApp
- activities integration directly into "Network Updates"
InApps is built using Shindig (Java)
Going forward, LinkedIn is working on support for OpenSocial 0.8.1, and providing a developer sandbox

To find out more about building an application on LinkedIn, please get in touch with LinkedIn, and come chat at the upcoming OpenSocial birthday event on November 13.

Posted by Dan Peterson, on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation

Launched: Yahoo!’s First Implementation of OpenSocial Support

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:49:00 +0000

Today, Yahoo is launching the developer-facing components of the Yahoo! Open Strategy. This includes our first implementation of OpenSocial support via the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP). With this launch we are giving developers access to Yahoo!'s social data through the OpenSocial JavaScript APIs in the canvas views of their applications. This is a big step for Yahoo! and adds to the success of OpenSocial as the portable way to write social applications on the Web.

This is just the beginning for YAP and OpenSocial. As a founding member of the OpenSocial Foundation, Yahoo! is committed to supporting the complete OpenSocial specification and is working with the community to expand the specification to include OSML and OpenSocial templates. In addition, we are currently implementing a Shindig-based OpenSocial container which will allow us to provide full support for the OpenSocial REST Protocols and thus for Portable Contacts.

As part of our support for OpenSocial’s JavaScript API, we are leading the way to a more secure Internet by using the open source Caja technology from Google to ensure the safety of our users. The advantage of this technology is that we can allow applications to go live on Yahoo! without review, thus saving time for our developers to go from code to launch. There may be some things that you wish to do with your applications that are not presently supported by Caja, but we feel that ensuring our user’s security will over time help all of us reap rewards. Over time, we will work with the Caja project to ensure that the widest, most secure JavaScript support will be available in our container.

This is all part of a broader release today called Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) v1.0, through which we are rewiring Yahoo! to create a horizontal social dimension and are making Yahoo! open to developers and publishers like never before — including opening our data and the extensibility of our products.

Today’s Y!OS release includes not just our initial release of OpenSocial support via YAP. It also includes the Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP), which is powering our OpenSocial APIs, and access to a new data query interface called Yahoo! Query Language (YQL). We are working with the OpenSocial community to explore standardization of some of these extensions. We invite you to learn more about all of these components at the Yahoo! Developer Network.

The overall rollout of Y!OS will be like rolling thunder across Yahoo! as we head into the next few months and 2009. We will be activating our “social dimension” across Yahoo! by integrating our Social Platform into everything we do. And we’ll also continue to open Yahoo! like never before with increased data access and by integrating YAP and OpenSocial into some of the world’s most trafficked Web sites, like My Yahoo! and the Yahoo front page at http://yahoo.com.

Yahoo’s audience is truly worldwide and our platform is fully internationalized from the beginning, ready for use in 31 countries and growing. We think it’s the beginning of an exciting time for Yahoo!, for our users, for open application development, open standards, and for OpenSocial. Check out Yahoo! Developer Network today and stay tuned for more OpenSocial news to come.

Posted by Sam Pullara, Vice President, Yahoo! Application Platform

Rock the Vote: the OpenSocial Foundation’s Community Representatives election is open

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 04:35:00 +0000

The election for the OpenSocial Foundation's community board representatives is now open. If you previously applied for membership, you should have received an email directing you to submit your ballot. The election will close at 11:59 PM PDT on Monday, November 3.

As listed below, the community nominated 13 individuals who, if elected, indicated they would be willing and able to serve. You can find biographical information as well as a brief statement from each candidate on the candidates info page (or click the links below to jump to a particular candidate).

From the above candidates, two will be elected by the broad OpenSocial community to serve on the OpenSocial Foundation's Board of Directors. As a reminder, the role of the OpenSocial Foundation is to promote the OpenSocial specification, and to help ensure that it remains freely implementable by all, in perpetuity. You can find more information about the foundation by visiting the OpenSocial Foundation FAQ.

If you have not submitted a membership application to the OpenSocial Foundation, and would like to have your voice heard in this election you still may do so. To be eligible to vote in the current election, you must submit the OpenSocial Foundation membership application (it's free) by 11:59 PM PDT on Wednesday, October 29.

If you have any questions or comments about the election please visit the OpenSocial community forum.

Posted by Dan Peterson, on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation

P.S. For those of you in the United States, I'd also encourage you to Rock the Vote in the upcoming presidential election.

myAOL Launches dev.my.aol.com to Support Gadget Development

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:41:00 +0000

Today AOL is thrilled to announce that it has launched a new open developer site at http://dev.my.aol.com designed specifically to support the gadget specification on myAOL. AOL originally announced its support of OpenSocial and its plans to adopt gadgets in May at Google's I/O developer gathering.

The launch of dev.my.aol.com is an important step for AOL towards the support of OpenSocial. It allows AOL to further open its sites to third party development and personalization by offering developers information on building gadgets and giving them the opportunity to submit them to share via the myAOL Gadget Gallery.

Now that myAOL has implemented the gadget spec, developers with existing gadgets can submit them to the myAOL Gallery and "widget factories" can give their developer communities a simple way to submit their work as well. For example, yourminis is now live with the ability to easily add any of their widgets to a myAOL page or submit them to the myAOL Gallery.

We're excited to have taken this significant step forward in support of Gadgets and the OpenSocial platform on myAOL. We look forward to working with Google and other leaders in the industry to continue work on this front, and encourage developers to take advantage of our new dev site to create new gadgets for all to use and enjoy.

Posted by Jen Consalvo, Director, Product Management, myAOL

You’re invited: OpenSocial’s First Birthday! Nov. 13th at MySpace San Francisco

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 01:32:00 +0000

Hard to believe, but OpenSocial is just a few weeks shy of being a full year old! To celebrate, we're getting together to look back on the great progress we've all made in the past year and to discuss where we should take OpenSocial next. And of course, we'll eat birthday cake!

You're invited! The event, which is free and open to anyone, will be on Thursday, November 13th, and is being hosted in San Francisco at MySpace's SOMA office. Developers, containers, and API designers alike have done a lot, even since the OpenSocial Summit in May, and we're excited about showcasing the cool stuff developers have done, talk about recent container launches, and discuss the future evolution of the spec. The day will include:

App developers talking about their experience developing with OpenSocial
Discussions and demos of the latest spec proposals (e.g. OpenSocial Templates)
Updates from OpenSocial containers such as MySpace, Yahoo!, orkut and iGoogle
Hacking. Yes, lots of time for programming with numerous experts on hand.
Partying. I already mentioned birthday cake, right?

We'll provide food, drink, and wifi. Doors will open at 10 am, and we'll finish off in the evening with a proper birthday party and social hour, so bring your party hat and get ready to code.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions for the event, please visit the OpenSocial community forum.

If you're going to be joining us, please help us plan by RSVPing for the event!

Posted by Dan Peterson, on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation

Netlog.com launches OpenSocial with instant translation in Europe for 35 million users!

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:01:00 +0000

Netlog, the European social networking site, has just made their OpenSocial 0.7 application platform available to more than 35 million members. OpenSocial, a set of common APIs for building social applications, provides a common infrastructure for the social web that enables both developers and websites to focus resources on their unique features rather than on dealing with different types of plumbing. Netlog developers can now develop for not only its 35 million members, but any of the 300 million users who are part of OpenSocial-enabled networks. Netlog only accepts fully integrated applications offering a clear added value and refuses applications forcing the user to leave the site, install the application or invite friends.

Since one of the most important features of Netlog is its extended localization, every applications should be available in all of the 23 languages the site currently supports. To make the localisation process easy, Netlog has opened its translation capabilities to third-party developers to provide seamless translation of any OpenSocial application. Developers write the application in one of the 23 languages and Netlog will do the translation for the other 22.

Developers receive 100% of the advertising revenue on the application page. Developers will also be granted access to Netlog's OpenSocial extension for the "Credit Economy". While Netlog expects most applications to be free, it gives developers the opportunity to monetize by charging credits for certain premium features in the application or for installing the application itself. By using the credit api, developers can easily tap into Netlog's micropayment channels available in more than 30 countries.

All the information for developers to get started with OpenSocial on Netlog is available at http://en.netlog.com/go/developer.

Posted by Toon Coppens & Folke Lemaitre, Netlog

Ning Launches OpenSocial Across 500,000 Social Networks

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:50:00 +0000

Ning just launched support for OpenSocial v0.7 across our more than 500,000 social networks.

This is the first type of OpenSocial support of its kind and we're excited to be offering it. OpenSocial now comes standard on Your Own Social Network for Anything on Ning, which means that anyone can now create their own social network for free and add OpenSocial applications to that network in just a few seconds.

For every social network created on the Ning Platform, members are able to browse through a branded directory of OpenSocial applications to add to their profile pages with a single click. Today at launch, each social network on Ning offers over 25 OpenSocial applications from which to choose, including file sharing from Box.net, poll creation from Polldaddy and e-commerce from Shopit.

In the coming months, we plan on expanding OpenSocial on your own social networks on Ning to allow applications to be placed on network main pages, and we'll also be rolling out v0.8 with support for the OpenSocial REST Protocol.

Here are a few other features of Ning's launch to highlight:

On Ning, you define the visual style of your network. Every social network created on Ning has an OpenSocial directory by default. The directory automatically takes on the branding and visual design of the network.
With support for gadgets.skins, OpenSocial applications on Ning can inherit the visual style of the member's profile page to which it's added. This is one area where Ning is unique from other general one-size-fits-all social networks, and Ning's OpenSocial applications are unique too.
Every OpenSocial application is automatically integrated into the viral loops on your social network on Ning. The ability for OpenSocial applications to write to a member's latest activity feed, send messages on behalf of the member (via requestSendMessage) and spread using a network's default viral sharing options are there by default.

If you're a developer, feel free to check out our new documentation. If you belong to any of the over 500,000 social networks on Ning, visit your profile page to start adding OpenSocial applications today!

Posted by Kyle Ford, Director of Product Marketing at Ning

Recent OpenSocial launches and spec evolution

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:52:00 +0000

Looking over the broad OpenSocial community, September was a very active month. In particular, there have been numerous OpenSocial deployments:

Netlog shipped OpenSocial apps to users throughout Europe
Hyves, a social network popular in the Netherlands, also launched with OpenSocial
Several new developer sandboxes are available for early access and prototyping:
- Mail.ru, a large Russian email site
- Viadeo, a professional social network, especially popular in France
- Lokalisten, a popular German social network
hi5, orkut, and iGoogle have deployed OpenSocial v0.8 JavaScript to their developer sandboxes
- hi5 even has an endpoint for the REST protocol available
At Yahoo!'s Open Hack Day, we also got a sneak peek of Yahoo's early work implementing OpenSocial

You can find links to 20+ OpenSocial containers on the OpenSocial Getting Started Guide.

We've also seen a lot of progress on the evolution of the OpenSocial spec and related docs:

Building off the OpenSocial compliance tests, there is now an OpenSocial Compliance matrix
- The compliance testing suite is an open source extension to the OpenSocial spec, so please provide feedback about the tests
- The matrix intends to make it easy to see "at a glance" what functionality is deployed on numerous containers
Visit the new OpenSocial Templates Developer's Guide to get started with the prototype of OpenSocial Templates
- OpenSocial Templates continue to evolve in the public templates spec list and on the OpenSocial Templates wiki
- The client-side prototype has been committed to Apache Shindig
The specification for OpenSocial v0.8.1 is complete, and, as per the full Release Notes, includes:
- tweaks to the format of the REST protocol for PortableContacts alignment
- an optional JSON-RPC protocol
- Note: the v0.8.1 tweaks do not require any gadget updates, as there are no changes to the OpenSocial v0.8 JavaScript API
The spec process has kicked off for OpenSocial v0.9
- Please get involved on the specification forum to influence the direction of OpenSocial
- For those just getting started, please review the spec process document

See you on the forums.

Posted by Dan Peterson, on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation

Nominations for OpenSocial Foundation Elections due Wednesday

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:01:00 +0000

To complete the ramp up of the OpenSocial Foundation, we need your input: the OpenSocial Foundation has two board seats that are to be filled by individuals representing the community.

If you have someone in mind for the board:

Nominations have been open since early September and will close on Wednesday, October 1, at 11:59 PM PST, so that the election can take place next week.

Looking forward to hearing from you. If you have questions or comments, please drop a note on the OpenSocial Community forum.

Posted by Dan Peterson, on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation

A Good Foundation for OpenSocial: Get Involved!

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:34:00 +0000

As promised a few months ago, the OpenSocial Foundation is up and running. This organization seeks to ensure that OpenSocial will remain implementable by all, at no cost, in perpetuity. This Foundation will also help nurture the real power behind OpenSocial: the community of developers, containers, and everyone contributing to the specification. The curious among you are welcome to peruse the OpenSocial Foundation FAQ. In addition to the individuals listed below, the complete Board of Directors will include two additional representatives from the community at large that will be nominated and elected by that very same community in the coming weeks.

The initial Board of Directors (five of the seven):

Anil Dharni, hi5
David Glazer, Google
Joe Greenstein, Flixster
Allen Hurff, MySpace
Sam Pullara, Yahoo!
TBD #1, Community Representative
TBD #2, Community Representative
* TBD directors will be determined by the community (that's you!)

If you'd like to get involved in the nomination and election process for the two community board seats, please fill out this short application to join the OpenSocial Foundation (it's free), and go ahead and submit nominations for those seats. If you have suggestions, questions, or comments, please visit the OpenSocial community discussion group.

Posted by Dan Peterson, on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation

Friendster Launches OpenSocial for 75 Million Users!

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:50:00 +0000

Friendster just deployed OpenSocial, v0.7, as part of the Friendster Developer Program. OpenSocial applications can now be introduced to over 75 million Friendster users around the world, 55 million of those are in Asia - Friendster has the largest social networking user base in Asia. Friendster also plans to support additional OpenSocial APIs in the coming months, including the new v0.8 API.

The Friendster Developer Program, launched in late 2007, and has seen significant traction to date with over 10 million unique users adding apps since launch. OpenSocial will further enhance the program by giving OpenSocial developers the opportunity to easily migrate their apps into the program.

Some great things to note about Friendster’s Developer Progam:

It’s the only way to reach the largest social networking user base in Asia
It has a completely open revenue model, ads are allowed anywhere in your app, no revenue share with Friendster
To propel your app throughout the network, Friendster has implemented viral channels including requestSendMessage and requestShareApp
There is very low overlap between Friendster’s user base and other social networks, so this is excellent chance to get new users installing your apps globally

Developers can view the latest technical documentation, and register for the program, at http://www.friendster.com/developer. Developers are also encouraged to join the OpenSocial Friendster Developer group. To view the current directory of third-party applications already launched on Friendster, go to http://www.friendster.com/apps.

Posted by Prakash Dodeja, Director of Engineering at Friendster

Recent happenings in OpenSocial

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:20:00 +0000

Over the past few weeks, there have been a lot of interesting things happening in the broader OpenSocial community. Here are some recent updates: orkut has completed its OpenSocial rollout for users worldwide, Webon was just launched by Lycos supporting OpenSocial, and now more than a dozen sites ("containers") support OpenSocial in production, with a reach to 275 million users. There are also many other containers in the works, such as AOL, Friendster, LinkedIn, Netlog, and Yahoo! (hear from them and others in the Google I/O "Meet the Containers" video), and it was great to see that Glam.com is working to launch an application platform for their network that reaches 77 million monthly visitors around the globe.

On the spec front, we continue to work together to make OpenSocial the most developer-friendly way to build social apps:

With OpenSocial 0.8's RESTful API, OpenSocial is growing beyond its JavaScript roots and venturing into server-to-server sync and mobile access

To help simplify implementation and adoption of both efforts, PortableContacts and OpenSocial's REST API are proposing technical alignment

Looking further ahead, there is a prototype showing client-side templates in action, building off the OpenSocial templates specification

If you have suggestions, questions, or comments, please get involved.

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

Glam Media announces new OpenSocial developer platform

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:57:00 +0000

Today Glam Media is happy to announce the upcoming Glam Application Platform with support for OpenSocial. Glam Media is a network of 600+ high-end content publishers, with over 77 million monthly visitors globally. The Glam Platform will serve third-party applications to Glam's network of publishers. Publishers and website owners will then be able to choose from a rich list of applications and embed them in their blogs and websites.

Glam's OpenSocial implementation, based on Apache Shindig, is interesting because Glam is enabling applications to run on any website, not just Glam's. Glam is planning to contribute the container extension back to the OpenSocial community so other platforms can do the same.

As of today's announcement, Glam is inviting application developers to join the private beta. Beta program participants will have a head start building engaging applications for the Glam Network's users.

For more information on how to join the private beta of the Glam Platform, please visit http://developer.glam.com.

Posted by Adam Souzis, Platform Architect, Glam Media

Use AJAX Libraries API to speed up OpenSocial apps

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 21:26:00 +0000

Posted by Shawn Shen, Developer Programs

Do you use popular JavaScript frameworks like Prototype or jQuery in your OpenSocial applications? Do you share the pain your users might feel when they have to download a popular library like prototype.js yet another time even though it’s been already fetched 33 times? Wouldn’t it be nice if you don’t have to worry about gzipping or minifying these libraries and paying to have them cached on some expensive content delivery network in order to speed up your apps?

If your answer to any these questions is "yes," you are in luck because Google's AJAX Libraries API precisely addresses these common pain points that many app developers have.

For example, to load Prototype version 1.6.0.2 you would place the following in your HTML:

Another way to load these libraries is with the Google AJAX API Loader's google.load() method.

By loading popular JavaScript libraries from Google's free content delivery network, you get:

A faster user experience (for those that already have fetched the files)
Automatic gzipping and minification, so the files themselves are really small

In short, while the AJAX Libraries API is geared toward all web apps using standard JavaScript frameworks, it is particularly handy for OpenSocial apps because they are rendered in iframes, often multiple times (e.g. on user profiles). The steps involved in optimizing your apps can be tricky (See the latency best practices article). By using AJAX Libraries API, app developers can spend more time building out functionality and less time worrying about latency.

OpenSocial in China!

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:12:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

Wow -- Google Developer Day in Beijing has kicked off with a bang for OpenSocial! We're really excited to welcome several new networks to the OpenSocial community: 51.com, 51wan.com, Douban.com, Hainei.com, Tianji.com, Xiaonei.com, and YiQi.com. These sites are working on supporting OpenSocial and expect to rollout in the coming months. This is great momentum for OpenSocial in China, and those sites join some others that have already launched in China, including MySpace.cn and Tianya.cn, as well as CityIN.com, which has shipped a sandbox for developers.

As another great update, the OpenSocial documentation is now available in Chinese. We're eager to help grow the community and are running an OpenSocial hackathon in Beijing on June 13, 2008 to go deep on the technology.

As always, you're welcome to get involved online (in Chinese).
(If you have questions and prefer English, of course, you're welcome to visit this OpenSocial group.)

IDtail brings OpenSocial to Korea

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:16:00 +0000

Posted by Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate

The South Korean social network IDtail has just opened their OpenSocial driven website to all users. This is the first OpenSocial container in Korea, and it launches with four locally developed applications. AhnLab, the developers of IDtail, are holding a conference on OpenSocial on June 13th at the COEX grand ballroom in Seoul, with over four hundred people expected.

It's great to see OpenSocial continue to spread around the world - if you're developing OpenSocial applications in Korean or any other language, do make sure to look into the message bundle API so that the apps can easily be localized for new languages and countries.

Helping the OpenSocial Ecosystem: Get Involved

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:45:00 +0000

Posted by Shawn Shen, Developer Programs

We'd like your feedback on how to improve the OpenSocial ecosystem and we'd very much appreciate it if you could fill out this survey.

First, please tell us a little bit about yourself. Second, we'd like to know how satisfied you are with the communication and documentation surrounding OpenSocial. And third, we would like your help planning OpenSocial summits and hackathons throughout the rest of 2008 (e.g. OpenSocial London and South America hackathons and the recent OpenSocial Summit)

We'll summarize survey results on the OpenSocial blog within the next few weeks.

OpenSocial v0.8 is defined

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Wed, 28 May 2008 09:22:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

Good news: OpenSocial v0.8 has been fully specified! This represents the next evolution of the OpenSocial API, which was scoped, specified, and built via an open process run by the community. The best news is that OpenSocial v0.8 includes a RESTful API which enables non-JavaScript app development as well as things like server sync, or even mobile app creation. In addition to the RESTful API, there have been some functionality enhancements and convenience methods added to the JavaScript API. Check out the OpenSocial v0.8 Release Notes for the full details.

With the spec finalized, Apache Shindig is well on its way implementing OpenSocial v0.8, so expect to see containers supporting it in the coming weeks and months.

For now, if you’re building apps using the OpenSocial API, stick with any of the containers supporting OpenSocial v0.7 as listed on the Getting Started Guide.

OpenSocial Summit Wrap-up

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:36:00 +0000

Posted by Jason Costa, Developer Programs

Thanks again to everyone who came out for last week's OpenSocial Summit. For those that were not able to make it, we covered a variety of topics in depth, including a discussion around the proposed v0.8 draft spec, which includes a RESTful API, as well as a proposal for an OpenSocial templating language. It was great to hear feedback from everyone, and we heard about some great progress updates from a few OpenSocial containers who all recently launched a developer sandbox which includes OpenSocial (links go to the sandboxes):

Hyves - 6.5 million unique users primarily in the Netherlands

imeem - 24 million unique users each month on imeem.com

Netlog - 34 million unique members across Europe

In addition, we've pulled together a full recap from the summit, which has links to presentations, some videos, and notes from the sessions.

We look forward to talking with more folks next week at Google I/O.

Friend Connect means more users for OpenSocial apps and containers

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Wed, 14 May 2008 05:01:00 +0000

Posted by Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate

With yesterday's announcement of Google Friend Connect, making any website into a social website is now much easier. Website owners can paste a small bit of JavaScript into their site, adding social features for their users without having to write any code themselves.

For OpenSocial application developers, this gives you a whole new audience for your apps, beyond the hundreds of millions of users on existing social networks that support OpenSocial.

For OpenSocial containers, this makes your users' friend relationships more valuable by bringing them to other sites they visit and enlivens your activity streams with actions from their friends on these sites.

When I go out to talk to website developers about OpenSocial, I ask the question:
"Who here has written user registration code?"
- a lot of hands go up
"And who enjoyed it?"
- most hands go down.

To add personal or social features, websites need to know information about their users and their friends, but gathering and storing this is a lot of extra work. Prompting people to enter their information over and over again, for every site they visit, becomes tedious, often causing visitors to abandon the sites.

By abstracting out the ability to discover social information, OpenSocial enables web developers to write social applications that draw upon existing trusted sources that have become OpenSocial containers. However, up until now, becoming a container - adding new social applications for your users - has meant having to provide your own source of personal and social information. By using securely authenticated APIs from existing social sites, Friend Connect means any website can host OpenSocial apps.

In the future, Friend Connect will call the RESTful API for containers that support OpenSocial v0.8, helping their users share their web-wide experiences with each other on their favorite social site.

Friend Connect uses three open standards to connect to other websites. It uses OpenID for identity and logging in, it uses OAuth to authorize access to friend and profile data on existing sites that host it, and it uses OpenSocial to embed the applications within your site.

Making the web more social through the use of open standards is what OpenSocial is all about - have a look at example Friend Connected sites like www.ingridmichaelson.com and www.bibleapps.com. To find more details about the preview release, or to sign up as a test site, go to google.com/friendconnect/.

Wednesday’s OpenSocial Summit: Detailed Agenda

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Sat, 10 May 2008 01:45:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

As a follow-up to the post earlier this week, we're now only a few days away from the OpenSocial Summit happening on Wednesday, May 14th at the Googleplex (1400 Crittenden).

We're looking forward to discussing the draft proposal for OpenSocial v0.8, which includes a RESTful API, as well as diving deep on topics such as App Building Best Practices, Security with OAuth and Caja, and brainstorming about a templating language for OpenSocial.

To get a better sense for the flow of the event, and for your planning purposes, you're welcome to review the OpenSocial Summit's detailed agenda.

The doors open at 9:30am with a light breakfast, and the event kicks off at 10:00am. The event is entirely free (we'll provide food, drinks and wifi) -- all you need to bring are your ideas and potentially a laptop.

You can visit the RSVP form to let us know you'll be coming.

OpenSocial Summit: May 14th, at the Googleplex

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Tue, 06 May 2008 01:01:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

On Wednesday, May 14th, we're hosting an OpenSocial Summit at the Googleplex (1400 Crittenden Lane) in Mountain View.

There has been a lot happening with OpenSocial since the last event at Six Apart in San Francisco, and we're eager to get folks together to talk about experiences so far, and brainstorm about the future. The main topics for the summit include:

Discuss the proposed OpenSocial v0.8 spec

Review the state of the OpenSocial RESTful API

Discuss the design for an OpenSocial Templating language

Brainstorm ideas for future iterations of the OpenSocial spec

Updates from containers such as hi5, iGoogle, MySpace, and orkut

In addition, there will be several breakout sessions on topics such as:

App building best practices

Security: OAuth and Caja

Shindig

and several other topics

Of course, there will also be a good environment for coding, and people around to help. In addition, we'll walk through a tutorial for those just getting started.

If you have OpenSocial questions, this is a great place to ask. The summit will start at 10am; food, drinks, and wifi will be provided.

Please RSVP for the summit!

OpenSocial Updates: MySpace, orkut, App Engine, makeRequest, oh my!

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 19:14:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

Now that I’m back from OpenSocial’s London Hackathon (write-up, pics), and meeting fellow Shindig folks at ApacheCon EU, I wanted to take a moment to highlight some important happenings in the community:

Just a few days ago, MySpace’s apps gallery went out of beta, which means more apps in front of more users.

At Web 2.0 Expo, Lou Moore from hi5 gave an interesting presentation about Implementing an OpenSocial Container.

Earlier this week, iGoogle launched a developer sandbox, which supports OpenSocial, a new UI, and a “canvas” page.

Little more than a week ago, orkut.com launched OpenSocial in India, which gets OpenSocial out to 10% of their users.

Looking forward, the technical details for OpenSocial version 0.8 are coming together on the specification discussion group.

In addition to launch updates, we’ve had some interesting additions to the technical resources available for app developers:

If you’re taking advantage of the OpenSocial Persistence layer, you should check out this new requesting data article by Jason Cooper.

If you’re building an app that uses a remote datastore, you should check out Arne Rooman-Kurrik’s article about using gadgets.io.makeRequest.

For those of you previewing Google App Engine, you should check out Lane LiaBraaten’s article that shows you how to power an OpenSocial app with Google App Engine.

If you’re looking to learn more about OpenSocial, for those of you in South America, there are a lot of events coming up in the next 2 weeks in Argentina and Brazil. Also, everyone should definitely check out what is happening on the “Social” track of Google I/O, coming up on May 28 and 29 in San Francisco.

Update: fixed a typo in Lane's name.

iGoogle sandbox launches with OpenSocial support

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:10:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Holevoet, Developer Programs

Fellow OpenSocial developers, I'm happy to announce the opening of the iGoogle developer sandbox, which supports both OpenSocial and an updated version of the gadgets API.

The iGoogle sandbox supports OpenSocial 0.7, including friends and activity streams as well as a home and canvas view of your gadgets. Later, iGoogle will support the requestSendMessage function to facilitate growth of your gadget.

OpenSocial developers who modify their gadgets for iGoogle will be able to reach tens of millions of additional users at launch.

For more information about the new sandbox and to sign-up, make sure to check out the getting started guide. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, join the discussion in the iGoogle Developer Forum.

Sunday’s OpenSocial Hackathon in London: Details

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:06:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

Earlier we mentioned that this Sunday, the 6th of April, we will be running an OpenSocial app develoment hackathon in London.

BT has graciously volunteered to host this event at BT Centre, 81 Newgate Street. London EC1A 7AJ, just across from St. Paul's tube station, and we hope to see you there.

The event will start at 11am and go as long as people can still type. We'll provide all the food you need (including pizza and beer), as well as a strong wireless network and power outlets. If you're an early riser, you're welcome to come from 10am on. You simply need to bring your laptop, design ideas, and maybe even a few friends. The event is totally free.

What's in store? We'll walk through the state of the world around OpenSocial, including major launches by hi5, MySpace, and orkut, and then jump into coding. For those interested, we'll run a tutorial to step through building a simple OpenSocial app. Also, if you have any questions about Caja and Shindig, this is a fine place to discuss those projects.

In addition to Google engineers, on hand will be engineers from Hyves, MySpace, Netlog, studiVZ, XING, and more! who will be able to talk with you about their plans for OpenSocial.

What are you waiting for? RSVP here!

hi5 Launches New Developer Platform; Helping Establish the OpenSocial Foundation

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:25:00 +0000

Posted by Lou Moore, hi5 Director of Engineering

I’m here to share some exciting news from hi5...

Today we launched a robust new application development platform that enables developers in the OpenSocial community to more easily create, deeply integrate and increase the success of their applications on hi5. As a leading international social network (#1 in over 20 nations), the 8th most-trafficked website in the world, and with less than 25% active user overlap with any of the other leading social networks, hi5 presents a significant growth opportunity for developers’ applications — particularly given the many viral channels we’ve provided to support adoption of your apps. We hope you will contact us soon to get your apps on hi5, or build from scratch on our platform. You can also reach our platform team on this IRC chat channel: irc://irc.freenode.net #hi5dev.

(The new hi5 Application Directory)
In addition to the platform launch, hi5 also announced today that our company will be joining Yahoo!, MySpace and Google to help establish the OpenSocial Foundation. As many of you know, we have been a proponent of the OpenSocial initiative from the beginning, and are now simply taking our commitment to the next level. We look forward to working with many of you in this endeavor.

In the meantime, we’d like to extend thanks to all of the developers who have been hard at work preparing applications for our platform launch. There are so many that we can’t list them all here, but we sincerely appreciate your contribution! In fact, we are all very excited at hi5 about the many new ways your applications will enable our users to communicate, interact and have fun on hi5, as well as across the social web.

OpenSocial Hackathon in London: 6th of April

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 05:53:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

Good news: some OpenSocial folks are headed to London, so anyone and everyone is welcome to come learn about OpenSocial and get your hands into some code.

On Sunday, the 6th of April, we'd like to invite all of you in London (or nearby) to come hack on OpenSocial. In addition to copious wifi, we'll walk through the state of OpenSocial and walk through the API, so you can get off and running building applications.

The rest of the agenda? Beer + Pizza + Code.

This is a great opportunity to come and get started developing applications for websites like hi5, MySpace, and orkut using OpenSocial, as well as learn about upcoming plans and projects like Caja and Shindig.

If you're intersted, please RSVP on this form.

OpenSocial, meet Yahoo!

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:45:00 +0000

Posted by Wade Chambers, Yahoo! VP of Platforms

Hi Everyone! At Yahoo! we're really excited to begin collaborating with the entire OpenSocial community. As we mentioned in the press release and on the media call this morning, we are big believers in industry cooperation and community-driven efforts. Openness is in the Internet's DNA and it's also a major aspect of our culture here at Yahoo!.

We definitely feel like we are at the beginning of a great relationship with OpenSocial. The community of developers that have come together to take the specification where it is today is truly impressive. It's a diverse, broad and talented group, and I'm sure it's also poised to keep growing. For a little more background on our decision to support OpenSocial and join the foundation, check out my blog post at Yodel Anecdotal.

Live on MySpace: First Batch of OpenSocial Apps & OpenSocial 0.7

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:12:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

Congrats to MySpace and the thousands of hardworking developers in the MySpace sandbox -- OpenSocial apps have gone live on MySpace! This marks the second phase of the MySpace Developer Platform where developers can now test their approved applications more broadly with MySpace users and see what other applications are being developed. You can read more details in MySpace's blogpost. In just little over a month since the initial platform launch, MySpace's users now get to take advantage of a wide-range of OpenSocial apps covering music, movies, politics, and many other things.

Not only are these apps available to users, but the MySpace platform is now supporting the OpenSocial 0.7 API. This is a great time to jump in and build an app, or get an existing app up and running on MySpace. To get started, visit the MySpace Developer Platform site.

OpenSocial at Google I/O

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 06:44:00 +0000

Posted by Jason Cooper, Developer Programs

Looking to kick off this summer with a bang? The Google Developer team recently announced a two-day gathering for developers keen on discovering a wide variety of products and tools that will help shape the web of tomorrow. This event, lovingly named Google I/O, will be held in San Francisco's Moscone Center May 28-29. You can find a detailed agenda, registration form, and list of sessions on the official event page.

To whet your appetite for all things OpenSocial, a number of related breakout sessions and code labs are planned covering everything from how to build your application to run in multiple OpenSocial containers to best practices for making your social app viral. Of course, there are plenty of other sessions, focusing on topics such as geo and mobile, all designed from the ground up to make you more productive using Google tools and introduce ideas to help you take your applications to the next level.

See you there!

hi5′ing in Mexico to gear up for March 31st launch

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:41:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

Earlier this week, you may have read that hi5 is holding a hackathon on Saturday. It turns out that this hackathon is actually going to happen in two countries! While some of us are busy writing code and eating pizza at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA, our friends in Mexico will be hacking away and socializing at the Campus Estado de Mexico of the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. We're excited to share ideas, make new friends both here and abroad, and, of course, build some great apps.

hi5's March 31st launch is just a few short weeks away, and their sandbox offers a great opportunity to spin up an app. We can't wait to see how new social apps will help users all over the world get connected and have fun on the web.

To join in on the festivities, if you're in Mexico, click here for more information. Those planning to join us in Mountain View can RSVP to hackathon@hi5.com.

hi5′s Hosting a Hackathon — Hooray!

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:46:00 +0000

Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, Developer Programs

hi5.com, an international social network, is very far along implementing OpenSocial as part of their developer platform, and they're gearing up to launch OpenSocial apps to 80 million users, spanning over 200 nations on March 31st, 2008. To help developers get ready, hi5 is putting on a hackathon on Saturday, March 15, at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA.

Space is limited so RSVP now by sending an email to hackathon@hi5.com. Bring your laptop, power adapter, and ideas -- we'll provide the food, drinks, and WiFi.

Certainly, if you'd like to get started now, you can sign up for an account at sandbox.hi5.com, and you can visit the hi5 Developer Center to learn more.

OpenSocial for the REST of us! A proposal for an OpenSocial RESTful API

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:07:00 +0000

Posted by Chris Schalk, Developer Advocate

John Panzer recently posted a draft proposal for the highly-anticipated OpenSocial RESTful API, enabling server to server communication between OpenSocial containers.

The proposed API defines a language-neutral and platform-neutral protocol for communicating between OpenSocial clients and container servers, and has both JSON and XML flavors. As the protocol operates independently of the Web page/JavaScript-centric environment, it opens up a whole new dimension for server-side developers of enterprise applications, for mobile developers and enables servers to update container-held data without having to route through a JavaScript client.

If you're interested in this topic, please check out the proposal, in the OpenSocial and gadgets specification discussion group.

You're very welcome to join the discussion.

Getting social at SXSW: join us at the OpenSocial OpenBar

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 23:28:00 +0000

Posted by Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate

As thousands of designers, developers, film makers, indie rockers, entrepreneurs and geeks begin to descend on Austin, Texas for this year's South by Southwest, I'm looking forward to a non-stop flurry of panels and parties, as well as conversations about many aspects of the social web at the OpenSocial OpenBar.

If you're working to build the next great social app, looking at ways to add social capabilities to your site, or simply want to be social at an open bar, come join the OpenSocial gang on Monday, March 10 from 6-8 p.m. at the back room of McCormick & Schmick's (401 Congress Avenue) in Downtown Austin.

As well as food and drink, there'll be free t-shirts for the first 100 people!

OpenSocial 0.7: Coming to a user near you

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:30:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

Following up on the discussions at the recent hackathon, OpenSocial 0.7's API specification has been finalized. The best news is that, based on numerous discussions with both app developers as well as container sites, we believe OpenSocial 0.7 has all the necessary pieces to launch OpenSocial apps to users at scale. In fact, both hi5 and orkut will be using OpenSocial 0.7 for their upcoming user-facing launches.

This API iteration represents significant enhancements to 0.6; in particular, viral-spread functions and activity stream templating have been introduced to support the needs of app developers. In addition, the gadgets specification and the emerging gadgets.* JavaScript API have been codified, and include details about letting containers cleanly support different views (e.g. profile or canvas).

You can review the complete details in the release notes, and the OpenSocial 0.7 JavaScript Reference. We've gone to great lengths to ensure that OpenSocial 0.7 is much more stable than prior API iterations, and, going forward, we're working towards smoother API transitions (e.g. deprecation, a wrapper JS, etc).

If you have any questions about the API, please speak up in the group.

Another way to talk to OpenSocial developers: IRC

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:23:00 +0000

Posted by Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate

When developing for OpenSocial, the developer groups, the Shindig list, the Caja group, and this blog are probably the first places you look. However, being able to chat live with other developers is often very helpful. There's been an IRC channel running on freenode.net since OpenSocial launched — here's the IRC URL: irc://irc.freenode.net/opensocial

You'll usually find other OpenSocial developers there to talk to, and maybe even someone to try out your new application or container.

To learn more about how to use freenode IRC, look here.

Six Apart Hackathon Wrap-up and Caja Intro

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 07:58:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

Last week's hackathon at Six Apart was a great opportunity to sit down with engineers from a good mix of containers supporting OpenSocial as well as chat with app developers about what they're planning to build. For example, we saw a neat demo from the folks at Zynga who wrote a Battleship application running in Hi5.

In case you weren't able to join us, the presentation slides and meeting notes are available, some video interviews are embedded below, and here are some high-level takeaways:

The hi5 sandbox has been updated to version 0.6.
The orkut sandbox has also been updated to version 0.6, and is being powered by Shindig (and the orkut developer's guide has been updated).
MySpace showed a live demo of an OpenSocial app running on their site.
We have published an OpenSocial Getting Started Guide, which includes links and status information about live containers.
The OpenSocial Developer's Guide has been updated with code samples for new features introduced in version 0.6.
From a roadmap perspective, OpenSocial 0.7 will be defined quite soon; you can get a glimpse in the slides above and in the feature priority list.

In addition to talking in-depth about the evolution of the OpenSocial API from 0.6 to 0.7, we also talked quite a bit about Shindig and Caja. The former, you may have read about previously, but let's discuss the latter now:

Today's method for including apps safely in a web page is to sandbox each application gadget within its own iframe element. This method lets the gadget authors use regular JavaScript syntax, but has performance implications -- each gadget requires a separate iframe and a separate network retrieval, so large numbers of gadgets add noticeable latency and resource overhead. We believe these issues can and should be addressed to make the web faster and safer for users.

Our long term approach, embodied in the Caja project (pronounced KA-hah), to addressing latency, security, developer convenience, and, most of all, user experience, is to safely inline a subset of JavaScript code via rewriting and an object-capability security model. The initial work is already open source, and you can find it at http://code.google.com/p/google-caja, and the good news is that this work is being integrated as an optional feature of Shindig (more on that below).

We have not yet proven that this approach is a full substitute for iframes, but we are making fast progress. Details on the approach can be found in the Caja draft specification. We welcome feedback; please discuss on the OpenSocial API group.

You can experiment with a sample OpenSocial app, which is being hosted by Shindig's out-of-the-box sample container that offers optional "cajoling," by visiting this link (note: this is intended for developer testing only, and is available with "best effort" reliability, but we do plan to offer bleeding-edge functionality).

This sample container lets you specify an arbitrary app xml file as well as manipulate the "state" of the container (e.g. for getFriends() or calls to AppData). In addition, if you want to test your app against Caja, simply check the "Caja" box. You can read more about using Caja with this sample container in this Shindig+Caja doc.

With that, I'll leave you with the video interviews. Of course, we really appreciate Six Apart's hospitality and look forward to the next hackathon. In the meantime, please let us know if you have any questions on the developer forum.

OpenSocial Hackathon: January 16th, San Francisco

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:36:00 +0000

Posted by Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate

On Wednesday, January 16, Six Apart is hosting an OpenSocial Hackathon in their office at 548 4th Street in San Francisco from 4pm to 11pm.

With the OpenSocial 0.6 release and Shindig and Caja to try out, this will be a great night to get up and running with OpenSocial. Whether you are building an application for one of the supporting social networking sites or adding support for OpenSocial applications to your own site, we look forward to meeting you.

Bring your laptop and code and meet developers from Google, hi5, MySpace, Ning, orkut, Plaxo, Six Apart and others.

For more details and to RSVP, go to upcoming.

IFPC and other JavaScript functionality contributed to Apache Shindig

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 02:05:00 +0000

Posted by John Hjelmstad, Software Engineer

To help bootstrap Shindig, we’ve been heads down over the past few weeks working to contribute more JavaScript functionality to Shindig’s Gadget Container JavaScript (for background about Shindig, please check the first commit post). In addition, to provide a cleaner API, you’ll notice that these new functions are in the gadgets.* JavaScript namespace, though, for backwards-compatability's sake, all the classic gadgets APIs are still supported as well. As discussed in the group, this is a continuation of the contributions of what’s been powering iGoogle.

So, what functionality did we add to the Shindig repository?

IFPC (Inter-Frame Procedure Call) -- A library facilitating communication between the container and gadgets.
Utility JavaScript -- Well-known convenience functions (e.g. shortcuts for getElementById).
Fetchers -- Includes content fetching through gadgets.io.makeRequest (formerly known as _IG_FetchContent) for both JSON and XML, and wraps XmlHttpRequest and in-server proxies.
User Prefs -- Functions implemented to get and set (read and write) user preferences, which are simply key/value pairs.

Next, beyond iterating on feature development in the open repository, we'll be continuing to contribute code to Shindig to reach feature parity with existing gadget containers, like iGoogle, and optimizing server performance.

Go ahead and check out the code, send any feedback to the shindig-dev@incubator.apache.org mailing list on what you'd like to see added, and bugs can be filed in the issue tracker (note: you'll need a JIRA account to file issues, but anyone can get an account).

Update: The last paragraph has been updated to direct feedback to Shindig's mailing list and the Apache issue tracker.

OpenSocial 0.6 and Beyond

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 16:26:00 +0000

Posted by Cassie Doll, Software Engineer

We're pleased to tell you that the OpenSocial JavaScript API version 0.6 has been defined, which updates the initial OpenSocial release to include what we've heard to be the most immediate pain points. As per the release notes, the main changes are:

Gadgets can now be container-aware, if necessary, to build tighter integration.
Developers can easily have apps that let users navigate between different surface, such as profile and canvas pages.
Tighter permission controls for reading the Viewer object from the datastore as well as an optional end-user prompting mechanism.
Introduced opensocial.makeRequest, which replaces _IG_FetchContent, allows both POST and GET, and includes an option for OAuth signing or authentication
Cleaned up the Activities class: removed the Stream class, removed the summary field, and removed folders (which were deprecated in 0.5 anyway)

We've also put together an overview and specification document, that describes how to comply with and extend OpenSocial, and further explains the background concepts and principles. With this definition in place, the containers are now able to update their sandboxes so application developers can write apps against 0.6. For example, after the holidays, the Orkut sandbox should be updated to 0.6 by mid-January. In the meantime, the in-memory sample container has already been updated to reflect the 0.6 specification.

Now that 0.6 is out there, we're looking for feedback on the JavaScript Priority List of functionality that we're thinking about for OpenSocial 0.7. The goal of this next iteration is to meet the minimum requirements for the initial consumer launches. We've listed each proposed change and bucketed them according to the following priority:

1 = Top priority. This will almost certainly make it into the next iteration (in this case, 0.7).
2 = High Priority. We will do our best to make this happen in the next iteration.
3 = Medium priority. These are likely candidates for a future iteration, but unlikely for 0.7.
4 = Lower priority. These almost certainly won't happen for 0.7, but are still on the radar.

We'd love to hear your feedback on the OpenSocial API group. In particular, please let us know if there is something you're counting on for a public launch that isn't listed as a priority 1 or 2.

P.S. A quick note for those of you who are building apps in the Orkut sandbox, we've just published an Orkut-focused developer guide as well, so check it out.

Let’s get this Shindig started

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 10:40:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

We're thrilled to tell you the initial commit to the Shindig repository is in. This is the first of many steps towards providing infrastructure for those wishing to host OpenSocial apps on their websites. In case you didn't see it last time, Shindig is a new project in the Apache Software Foundation's incubator (as per the formal proposal) that aims to provide an open source reference implementation of the entire OpenSocial stack -- Shindig's goal is to allow new sites to start hosting social apps in well under an hour's worth of work.

For those of you who aren't yet familiar with the open source world, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a vibrant open source community that promotes collaborative, consensus based development in an effort to produce high quality software. Several of the companies and individuals building support for OpenSocial have joined the ASF's Shindig incubator project to work -- in the open -- on a full implementation of OpenSocial. Today's commit is the first step towards that implementation; it includes a reference server and sample code that lets anyone add a few lines of JavaScript to a web page and display arbitrary gadgets. This initial contribution is based upon code that has been powering Google Gadgets and iGoogle for the past few years and is meant to bootstrap the Shindig project. Keep reading if you're interested in more technical details and the next steps.

As an introduction, the components of Shindig can be broken down as follows:

Gadget Container JavaScript -- core JavaScript foundation for general gadget functionality (read more about gadget functionality). This JavaScript manages security, communication, UI layout, and feature extensions, such as the OpenSocial API.

Gadget Server -- an open source version of gmodules.com, which is used to render the gadget xml into JavaScript and HTML for the container to expose via the container JavaScript.

OpenSocial Container JavaScript -- JavaScript environment that sits on top of the Gadget Container JS and provides OpenSocial specific functionality (profiles, friends, activities).

OpenSocial Gateway Server -- an open source implementation of the server interface to container-specific information, including the OpenSocial REST APIs, with clear extension points so others can connect it to their own backends.

This commit represents initial versions of the first two components, the Gadget Container JavaScript and the Gadget Server -- the latter written in Java. The Gadget Container JavaScript provides code to generate IFRAMES pointing to gmodules.com, offers some basic gadgets functionality (e.g. dynamic height), a layout manager, the edit dialog box, a cookie-based user preferences store, and an option to point IFRAMES at your Gadget Server instance instead of gmodules.com. The initial Gadget Server provides extensible scaffolding for processing gadgets: retrieving XML, parsing it, and processing it into a form that allows rendering of the gadget to a user or retrieval of its metadata.

While this initial commit hasn't been fully tested for production-level traffic, we'll be iterating on these issues in the coming weeks with the input of the open source community. Future development on the first two components will occur in the public repository, hosted in the Apache incubator. The latter two components will be coming into Shindig as OpenSocial evolves. For now, you can find the latest reference for the OpenSocial Container JavaScript in the mock container sample, which is also covered by the Apache 2.0 license.

Shindig's success, like that of all Apache Software Foundation projects, depends on the diverse community of people working on and using it. While the initial contribution of the Gadget Server was written in Java, Shindig is language neutral. Ning is planning to contribute an initial version of a PHP Gadget Server, and we've heard rumors of C#, Perl, and Ruby.

If you're interested to get started with the code, please review the README doc, to check out the source, and get your own service running.

This is the first of many steps in the evolution of Shindig, OpenSocial, and gadgets. We'd love your feedback.

Thoughts on implementing OpenSocial for your website

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:53:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

As OpenSocial evolves, we're eager for websites to be able to host OpenSocial apps. To that end, we released an in-memory container sample which includes an early glimpse at the Service Provider Interface (SPI) layer, and you may have heard about the Apache Shindig project proposal, which we're quite excited about. We're still iterating and thinking through some of the open questions, but we wanted to let you know what we're thinking about so we can get your feedback. Here are the highlights (there is a more detailed forum post linked below as well):

Privacy and Security:

Given that OpenSocial lets developers create applications that build upon users' profile information, we need to be especially careful with authentication and permissions. In the last blogpost, we talked about a proposal for a trusted version of IG_Fetch_Content, which leverages pieces of OAuth, to help address the trickiness around cross-domain authentication. Additionally, from a privacy perspective, there is an important difference between the owner and viewer of a particular app. When you are browsing a social network, you often end up on someone else's profile page -- that makes you the "viewer," and them the "owner."We plan to add an API that lets app developers handle this situation while respecting the container's privacy policy (e.g. if an app wants to perform some operation based on who the viewer is, it may have to prompt for the user's permission).

API and SPI iterations and refactoring:

OpenSocial is young, and we’re iterating quickly to extend the initial 0.5 spec. One improvement is to cleanly separate the API for app developers from the SPI for container implementors. This split is important to serve both audiences well: the former want a clean, convenient interface for building app; the latter want a clean interface for connecting those apps to their websites. Another improve is to add support for parts of the Google Gadgets API. There is a fairly broad scope to the Google Gadgets API, and, while we're eager to let all gadgets run everywhere, it seems best to start with the bare essentials. For the short term, we've heard that equivalents of IG_Fetch_Content, IG_Adjust_Frame_Height, and IG_Register_On_Load_Handler are crucial components that all containers need to support; if your OpenSocial gadget definitely needs something else, please let us know in the group.

Shindig: open source OpenSocial reference implementation

We're very excited to hear about the Shindig project proposal that is being put together for the Apache incubator, and we'll be contributing both code and engineers to the effort. Shindig hopes to provide a reference implementation for sites that would like to host OpenSocial apps; more on that as it happens.

Policies (gadget directory, discovery, and abuse)

Outside of the more technical conversations, there are many important policy questions. To name a few: How do users discover applications? Is there a central application directory? How can apps let viewers easily “get their own” copy of an app? What happens when an app is reported as malicious?

We’re still working through many of the specifics, but we’re attracted to the idea of an opt-in unified gadget directory as it would let developers have a single point of entry for listing their apps, and let containers offer a wide variety of apps with little effort. In addition, it would potentially allow for unified malware and abuse detection, and some global rankings.

Server-to-Server APIs:

The OpenSocial docs include an early iteration of the server-to-server API spec. We've heard from gadget developers that, although those APIs will be useful, it is fine to have a consumer beta release without them. This also makes it easier for containers to host OpenSocial apps more quickly. Therefore, we are working on the server-to-server API spec in parallel with the JavaScript API spec, but we are not gating on it.

***

Most importantly, we need your input. If you're considering hosting OpenSocial apps on your website, please review this more detailed forum post and provide your thoughts, concerns, and requirements.

P.S. For this and all future posts, we've turned on blog comments, and we welcome your remarks here. However, for more in-depth comments and discussion, we encourage you to use the OpenSocial group.

Improved Content Fetching for OpenSocial

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 04:30:00 +0000

Posted by Graham Spencer, OpenSocial Team

We've been getting great feedback on the 0.5 version of the OpenSocial API. One of the top requests we've heard from application developers is for a non-spoofable version of IG_FetchContent. See below for our current thinking, which incorporates some pieces of OAuth, based on a proposal from Jeremiah Robison of Slide.

OpenSocial applications need a mechanism to pass data from gadgets back to application servers in a way that cannot be spoofed. The basic solution is for the container server (e.g. orkut.com) to proxy communications from the gadget to the application server (e.g. ilike.com). Therefore trusted content fetching has two main steps: [1] the gadget contacts the container server, and [2] the container server contacts the application server.

For step 1 (gadget to container server), the container needs to be able to validate any parameters it knows about: the viewer id, the owner id (if known), and the application id. Validating these parameters is an implementation detail that is likely to vary between containers; for example, Orkut uses an encrypted token passed in the document fragment of the gadget URL. We will provide an open source implementation of this scheme.

For step 2 (container server to app server), the app server needs to be able to validate that the parameters really came from the container server (and were not forged by some other entity). OpenSocial will use OAuth's parameter signing algorithm. Note that most of the OAuth standard, including token exchange, is not required; OpenSocial only plans to use the parameter signing piece of the standard (including timestamp and nonce). OpenSocial will permit the HMAC-SHA1 method (except that the key is a shared secret between container and app, not a concatenation of tokens as specified in section 9.2) and the RSA-SHA1 method. HMAC-SHA1 is faster and easier to implement, but it requires more coordination than RSA-SHA1.

Let us know if you have any comments. We'll keep you posted as plans firm up.

Early container sample available

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 21:27:00 +0000

Posted by Cassie Doll, Software Engineer

As promised in the last post, we've just released an open source container sample. It's an early version, but should give you some idea of the Service Provider Interface (SPI) we will provide to any website which wants to host OpenSocial gadgets. This sample stores all of its data in memory, which allows you write a mock implementation of anything you want. While this does let you get your feet wet with the SPI, it does not provide adequate security for production, and should only be used for internal testing and demonstrations.

One of our most important goals for the SPI is that it's easy for new websites to become an OpenSocial container. With that in mind the current SPI only requires that you implement one javascript file: container.js. So if you want to start exploring, all you need to do is download the code in this release, change it to use data from your own backend servers, and you can have a demo ready to go.

Now don't forget that this is only version 0.5 of the API, so do not consider it stable. The overall architecture will remain the same, but we will improve it based on feedback wherever we can. We'll also add real security, app isolation, and other helpful things as part of the real development kit when that's released.

That said, please jump in and let us know how it goes. We're looking for feedback.

We’re here, listening, and working.

Dan Peterson, Product Manager — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:20:00 +0000

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

We're thrilled to see how much interest there is in websites hosting OpenSocial apps. While we've posted a fair number of articles and docs on how to build social applications, we know that there isn't a lot of documentation, or -- better yet -- code available to help you add support for the OpenSocial API to your website. We're working as fast as we can to fix that, and we apologize in advance for any bumpiness as this platform evolves.

Remember that today the OpenSocial API is at version 0.5. We expect significant enhancements between now and 1.0. In the coming weeks, we'll be sharing a proposed roadmap based on what we've heard so far -- we're eager for feedback, in order to make sure that the platform meets your and your users' needs.

For now, please stay tuned here, and expect more information very soon. If you have any questions or comments about hosting social applications, please visit the container forum.