Google Data » Sara

Successful Collaboration: Thomas Cook and TravelTainment increase conversion rate by 33% using A/B testing

Sara — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 09:52:00 +0000

Thomas Cook AG offers everything from holiday packages, last minute holidays and city trips to car rental and cruises via their website thomascook.de. The last minute and holiday package parts of the site are powered by the Internet Booking Engine of TravelTainment GmbH, which is part of the Amadeus Leisure Group.

Booking made easy: improving the last step in the booking process
Looking at the conversion funnel in their web analytics reports, Thomas Cook identified that a relatively large percentage of their visitors were reaching their booking page but were not completing a booking. They understood that improving this last step in the conversion process could dramatically increase their conversion rate and approached their partner TravelTainment to work together on optimizing this page. Their hypothesis was that a shorter and (visually) less complex booking page would lead to a higher percentage of visitors completing a booking.

The decision was made to run an A/B test in which the original page (A) was tested against an alternative (B). In the design of the alternative page Thomas Cook and TravelTainment focused on reducing the length of the page:

The layout of the booking form was improved

Before

After

The option to enter a voucher code was made expandable

Before

After

The (optional) car rental section was redesigned with less detail

Before

After

Payment option details were hidden and are only expanded when a payment option is selected

Before

After

The size of the call-to-action button at the bottom of the page was increased

Before

After

Improved booking page improves Conversion Rate by 33%
The changes listed above resulted in an alternative page that was around 40% shorter than the original. Over a period of almost 3 weeks half of the visitors to the booking page saw the original page (A), the other half saw the newly created alternative page (B). The alternative page had a 33% higher conversion rate than the original

What can you do?

Optimise your booking / checkout process to increase your conversion rate
To convert more visitors into buyers, regularly check your Web Analytics data to find out where a large percentage of visitors are leaving the conversion funnel of your website. Diagnose what the issues with the pages you have identified are, and start creating and testing possible alternatives. As a general guideline, try to keep an eye on the following when thinking about optimizing you booking / checkout pages:

Try to keep your booking or checkout process as easy as possible to complete
Offer your visitors the option to order as a guest without creating an account
Avoid visual distractions
Show the steps in the process
Show payment options early on in the process
Reduce the number of form fields (preferably, only include required fields)
Show examples when needed (for instance: date of birth (23.08.1976))
Clearly highlight errors when visitors forget to fill in a form field or use a wrong format
Offer assistance (show a phone number so visitors can contact you with questions)
Show visitors that their data will be secure
Try to get visitors to sign up for your newsletter after they completed the purchase / booking

As Thomas Cook and TravelTainment have shown in this case study, a simple A/B test with a tool like Google Website Optimiser can have a huge effect on your conversion rate!

(This case study was previously posted on the German Conversion Room blog)

Posted by Jos Meijerhof, Google Conversion Team

New resource launch – Agency Help Center

Sara — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:27:00 +0000

For Conversion Blog readers who manage Analytics and AdWords on behalf of their clients, there is a new and interesting resource available, starting today; this resource, the AdWords Agency Help Center, is specifically designed to help agencies master the suite of Google media solutions and account management tasks across many accounts.

The Agency Help Center is currently available for the US and UK. Over the course of Q4 2010, we'll be localizing this resource across multiple languages, as well as continuing to incorporate new agency-centric resources into the site.

Posted by: Sara Bonfioli, Google Analytics Team

System Update: 2 November

Sara — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 13:29:00 +0000

On 2 November, Google Analytics experienced technical difficulties which lasted for a few hours. Users saw lower visits than expected during this time.

We deployed a fix as as soon as we were alerted and Analytics is now back to normal and data has been restored.

Posted by Alan Wrafter, Google Analytics team

Introducing Web Analytics TV

Sara — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 09:32:00 +0000

We’re excited to introduce a new series of YouTube videos we're calling "Web Analytics TV" starring Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski from the Google Analytics team. These videos are a fun and interactive source of information around anything Analytics related.You can ask questions, and vote for your favourite questions from other viewers, via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and then have our experts answer them in the next installment.

Check out the latest episode below, and visit the Google Analytics YouTube Channel to see all previous episodes.

In this episode we introduce our new ninja award program (and ninja chop to go with it). Going forward, we will pick our favourite question and award the person the Analysis Ninja of the Episode award! They will get an autographed, personalized, copy of Web Analytics 2.0.

Our first winner is Sushant from New York for his excellent question on tabbed browsing and it’s impact on session level data. Congrats and please keep the great questions coming (and win!).

Here is the list of last weeks questions.

In this action packed episode we discuss:
(2:35) Combining (A AND B) OR (C AND D) in advanced segments
(4:03) Is there a way to tell how many people have opted out of being tracked by GA
(6:18) How does tracking Google Analytics and Urchin work together
(7:53) How is tabbed browsing tracked in Google Analytics?
(10:30) Do Website Optimizer A/B tests only track direct traffic?
(11:27) Are there any survey/voice of customer tools that integrate with GA?
(12:47) Does the async code execute faster than the traditional snippet?
(14:40) You can’t track users who have opted out of GA
(15:13) Why table report filters get removed when you navigate away from a page
(16:30) Why are there differences between Unique visitor reports? Which to use.
(18:00) Can Google Analytics track live chat forms?

Here are the links to the topics we discuss:
How you can automate requesting multiple advanced segments with the API to get AND precedence with Advanced Segments.
Kampyle - Google Analytics, Voice of Customer Integration
Live Person - Google Analytics, Integration

As always, if you need help setting up Google Analytics or leveraging the advanced configuration options, we recommend hiring a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

If you found this post or video helpful, share your comments below. And, if you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question and vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

Test Your Christmas Offers Early In The Season For Maximum ROI

Sara — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 09:39:00 +0000

Summary: Test early in November & use the increasing traffic to help you get through tests quickly, giving you insights that could help increase conversions throughout the busy Christmas period.

Conversion specialists understandably focus a lot of their attention on making it easier for visitors to use websites so that they can become customers. That should be a long term focus for all website owners. However, there are also short term, quick advantages to website testing. A tool like Google Website Optimiser can be used to test offers against one another and how those offers impact on conversions.

In the run up to Christmas, many retailers will be thinking about how they can get visitors to buy from their websites. One way of doing this is by introducing special offers to encourage visitors that they are in the best place to buy what they are looking for. But how do we know which offers are going to generate the best returns? We test them of course!

In 2009, Blume2000.de - a popular German florist - tested two offers in the early part of the Christmas season. It was a simple A/B test of two different Christmas offers. They tested whether people would prefer combining flowers with a CD of Christmas music (Version A) or a slightly more expensive offer of flowers with a box of chocolates (Version B) .

Despite being more expensive, their early testing showed that people were more interested in the chocolates combination (Version B). They saw a 6% rise in their conversions as a result of this simple test. You can see the case study (in German) here.

Start Testing Now

As you can see from the Insights for Search graph below, shoppers in the UK steadily grow their interest in Christmas Gifts from early October and by November a website owner will likely be seeing enough of an increase in traffic that they can make some quick tests and get conclusive feedback more quickly. This means your testing is finished before the really busy season starts.

So, what now? Prepare to test your Christmas offers while traffic is heating up but before the really busy season starts so you can make the most of the results!

You can learn how to run an A/B test using Google Website Optimiser here.

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Analytics team

Google welcomes Gizmo5

Sara — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:30:00 +0000

Today we're pleased to announce we've acquired Gizmo5, a company that provides Internet-based calling software for mobile phones and computers. While we don't have any specific features to announce right now, Gizmo5's engineers will be joining the Google Voice team to continue improving the Google Voice and Gizmo5 experience. Current Gizmo5 users will still be able to use the service, though we will be suspending new signups for the time being, and existing users will no longer be able to sign up for a call-in number.

We've acquired a number of small companies over the past five years, and the people and technology that have come to Google from other places have contributed in many ways, large and small, to all kinds of Google products. Since the GrandCentral team joined Google in 2007, they've done incredible things with Google's technology and resources to launch and improve Google Voice.

We welcome the Gizmo5 team to Google and look forward to working together to bringing more useful features to Google Voice.

Posted by Wesley Chan and Craig Walker, Group Product Managers

Japan’s mixi adds mobile support with its OpenSocial RESTful API

Sara — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:04:00 +0000

Hello, my name is Hidetaka Yamashita, and I am in charge of mixi's OpenSocial Mobile project. I am very happy to announce that mixi has recently added support for mobile phones to our OpenSocial platform. mixi.jp is currently the most popular Japanese social networking service (SNS) and has more than 17 million registered users. You may have heard about our recently launched OpenSocial developer sandbox in April. With this announcement, we are introducing our "mixi apps for mobile" platform which is based on OpenSocial's RESTful API using 2-legged OAuth.

Background

In Japan most people use 3G mobile phones that connect to the Internet at max 7.2Mbps. Currently, more people access the web through mobile phones than through PCs. In mixi's case, access from PCs is approximately 30% compared to mobile phone access, which is 70%. Therefore, it is crucial for mixi to offer mobile phone support for OpenSocial applications.

How mixi's mobile platform works

mixi's mobile development platform is targeted for non-native mobile development, where third party developers build mobile social apps on their own application servers. However, when accessing the application from a mobile phone, users still point their phones to the main mixi site as it serves mainly as a proxy to the third party site. As the response returns from the third party site, the mixi Application Proxy processes the response (which is purely content) and merges it into a complete XHTML response (by adding a header and footer). It is then passed back to the requesting mobile phone. Since the core application itself resides on a third party site, developers build their apps using the RESTful API with 2-legged OAuth to securely access social data from mixi.

With mixi's RESTful API with 2-legged OAuth, OpenSocial applications can run anytime, anywhere!

Supported Features

API (requires authentication using 2-legged OAuth). You can access all the core OpenSocial APIs, as well as photos and communities on mixi.

Timeline (for mobile)

Closed beta version - Ongoing now
Consumer launch - September 2009
Official ads program - September 2009
Virtual currency and Payment API - October 2009

To learn more about mixi's new OpenSocial mobile platform please visit: http://developer.mixi.co.jp/. (Note: this site is in Japanese.)

Posted by Hidetaka Yamashita, mixi, Inc.

Why Enterprise Software Provider Atlassian Chose OpenSocial

Sara — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:29:00 +0000

Hi, I'm Mark Halvorson the "Chief Imagineer" at Atlassian Software. Whenever I tell people my title it is usually received in one of two ways - a chuckle and a blank stare, or for those in the know some comment about Walt Disney. No, I don't make rides for an amusement park, but I do get to imagine inventive ways to combine thorny, enterprise challenges with some of the exciting things happening on the consumer web. That is why I'm particularly excited to blog in this forum about how Atlassian is bringing OpenSocial to the Enterprise.

Enterprise, meet OpenSocial

Much like "Imagineer" makes you think Walt Disney when you hear OpenSocial, you are likely thinking: Orkut, MySpace, and other Internet social networks. When we heard OpenSocial we thought: now there's some cool technology we can use to bring our portfolio closer together, and closer to lots of great stuff on the Internet.

Atlassian is a seven-year young software company, hailing from Australia, and building collaboration and productivity tools for developers and teams. Many of you may of come across two of our better known products: JIRA, an issue tracker, and Confluence, an enterprise wiki. The rest of the portfolio includes a series of developer tools: FishEye, for exploring source code on the web; Crucible, for peer code review; Bamboo, a continuous integration server; and Clover, for test coverage analysis. We also offer Studio, which combines several of these products into a hosted integrated development suite.

Development is a social activity

Development is social. Developers work in teams, often with other non-developers like product managers and technical writers. Those teams work together on a variety of shared objects: specifications, tasks, documentation, source code, builds and projects. Each of those shared objects generate lots of activity: comments, subtasks, notifications of changes and edits, build failures, code commits. These teams use lots of different tools and systems: wikis, bug trackers, build automation systems, source code repositories. That's a huge internal social network. People working with people, people working with systems, and systems working with systems - a river of activity that needs to funnel to the people who care about it most. Our mission is to help developers collaborate and communicate easier, and in the process help them write higher quality code faster.

Okay, so why OpenSocial?

With eight products that support various parts of the development process, each with their own dashboard, and each spitting off data and activity that the others could benefit from, OpenSocial gave us an inventive, proven integration pattern: gadgets . We've embraced OpenSocial gadgets as a method of integration between our own products and between other enterprise software, and we're using OpenSocial gadgets as a mechanism to inject functionality and information from our products into other OpenSocial-compliant containers on the Internet, like Gmail or iGoogle.

JIRA 4.0 will be the first OpenSocial container in our portfolio to ship. JIRA has implemented OpenSocial through Shindig as a series of Atlassian plugins, which we call the Atlassian Gadgets plugins. JIRA produces Gadgets that can be displayed by other OpenSocial-compliant containers, including iGoogle and Gmail, and authentication between Gadget producers and consumers is handled through OAuth. We're excited about the possibilities. JIRA dashboards can now quickly assemble build status from Bamboo, project updates from Confluence, assigned code reviews from Crucible, all in the context of the issues and tasks assigned to a developer in the context of a JIRA project. Are you a team lead, and spend most of your time in Gmail? No problem, take all of that same information and park it there, so it's right alongside your inbox.

We've launched a little site that talks more about what we're doing at http://www.atlassian.com/opensocial. You can also follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/atlassian. I hope to do more blogging here about things we learn and cool stuff we're experimenting with. In the meantime, here's short video of how a dev manager, who may live in Gmail, can file issues and track the state of projects and builds using Atlassian Gadgets in Gmail.

Posted by Mark Halvorson, Chief Imagineer, Atlassian Software Team

Hi5 launches hi5 Coins payment platform using OpenSocial Virtual Currency API

Sara — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:57:00 +0000

Ever since launching our OpenSocial platform in March 2008, developers have been eager for a unified payment platform for collecting micro-transactions on hi5. Over the past year, we have moved ahead to make such a virtual currency platform available to developers while ensuring a positive user experience for our members. Over the last few weeks, hi5 has been launching our first third-party games integrated via OpenSocial-compliant APIs to our virtual currency platform – providing a standard payment method for developers to monetize their applications through our audience of over 60 million active users around the world.

The first step in this progression was the launch of our virtual currency back in December 2008, which allowed users to buy hi5 Coins and use them to purchase virtual goods on the site. This platform was initially accessible only for hi5 premium features like Gifts. We rapidly expanded the ways that users could get real currency into the system – going beyond credit/debit cards to include payment methods, such as mobile SMS, offers and alternate cards, like Ultimate Game cards, that are popular in different parts of the world.

The next step was to make our payments interface OpenSocial compliant. In order to make our virtual currency more universal across hi5 and non-hi5 applications, our OpenSocial platform team collaborated with other containers to propose an OpenSocial Virtual Currency API as an extension to the OpenSocial specification. Our virtual currency interface was expedited due to the work started by other OpenSocial containers like Xiaonei.com, 51.com, and Netlog.com. With real use cases from Asia, Europe and Latin America, the containers quickly converged on the API specifications.

The hi5 OpenSocial Virtual Currency interface is already live in public beta with several third-party developers like RockYou (RockYou Pets), Playdom (Poker Palace) and Small Worlds, enabling them to collect direct user payments within their games. We have a number of additional partnerships that will launch soon. OpenSocial developers can now leverage a standard virtual currency spec across containers – allowing them to monetize through micro-transactions without worrying about the details of payment processing, currency conversions, localized payment methods or other logistical challenges. Our users benefit, as well, with more outlets for spending their hi5 Coins and a simplified and familiar process for making payments on the hi5 site. We look forward to continuing to work with the OpenSocial community to innovate on the virtual currency standard and to make micro-transactions between users and developers a viable and growing revenue stream.

Posted by Anil Dharni, VP of Products at hi5 and member of the OpenSocial Foundation Board of Directors

Register Now! San Francisco DevJam – Tuesday, May 26th

Sara — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:20:00 +0000

Greetings Developers!

The MySpace Open Platform would like to invite you to the MySpace San Francisco DevJam.

This DevJam covers everything you’ll need to know about how to build great apps using MySpace Open Platform. It will begin with the State of the Platform, and tell you all about what’s happening with the container and things to come. It’ll cover everything from porting apps to MySpace, leveraging messaging channels, OpenSocial 0.9, OSML, using OpenSocial outside the container, and everything in between. You won’t want to miss this DevJam event!

If you can’t attend in person, don’t worry! We plan to livestream the event, stay tuned on that front for more details…

Guest Speakers include:

Jason Oberfest, General Manager of the MySpace Open Platform and SVP of Business Development
Gerardo Capiel, VP of Product for the MySpace Open Platform
Dan Yue, Co-Founder of Playdom
Sebastien de Halleux, Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of Playfish
Max Newbould, Product Lead for MySpace Open Platform’s OpenSocial container
Max Engel, Product Lead for MySpaceID

And many more!

Space is limited, so click below to see the full agenda and to register now!

http://myspacesfdevjam.eventbrite.com/

Hope to see you there!!

Posted by MySpace Open Platform Team

Sonico.com announces the launch of its OpenSocial Container

Sara — Fri, 15 May 2009 22:26:00 +0000

Hola! My name is Alvaro Teijeiro and I am Sonico’s development manager.

I’m happy to announce that Sonico has recently launched its OpenSocial developer sandbox! Sonico.com is one of the leading social networks in Latin America with more than 35 million registered users. Positioned as the second largest social network in Brazil, Sonico is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese. We’re currently looking for select launch partners that can work with us to provide valuable engaging apps for our upcoming June production launch.

To request access to the developer sandbox, visit http://sandbox.sonico.com.

Background
Sonico is a social communication platform launched in July 2007 that merges social utility and entertainment to communicate and keep in touch with friends, family and co-workers. Sonico has been developed with a strong emphasis in user legitimacy, privacy and personalization, and is being widely adopted across Latin America.

In addition to popular features such as photo and video sharing, we’ve recently launched a virtual currency system that can be used to purchase a wide variety of goods and services, such as virtual gifts, greeting cards and profile skins. We’re very excited to allow app developers to tap into this new economy and will be working towards it during the next couple of months!

Detailed specs on Sonico’s features, growth and OpenSocial implementation can be found in the following presentation:

Sonico OpenSocial Launch

View more presentations from Sonico Presentations.

Implementation Overview: OpenSocial v0.8.1
Sonico's OpenSocial platform includes the following:

Full support for the core Opensocial APIs:

AppData
People/Person
Activities

Gadget rendering of home, profile, preview and canvas views

Dimensions for views are the same as used by Orkut

Viral features:

requestCreateActivity
requestShareApp
requestSendMessage

RESTful APIs

RESTful and RPC protocols

Upcoming Supported Features

Access to PhotoAlbum API by July
Access to Virtual Currency API by August

For further implementation details and future updates, please see: http://wiki.opensocial.org/index.php?title=Sonico

Timeline
Developer Sandbox – Available now! (since April)
Consumer Launch - June 2009

We’re really excited to work with app developers to deliver engaging, value added applications to millions of users!

For more information regarding Sonico.com OpenSocial platform, please visit and/or contact us at http://sandbox.sonico.com.

Posted by Alvaro Teijeiro, CIO, Sonico

Japan’s Mixi Announces Open Beta Launch of its OpenSocial Container

Sara — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:30:00 +0000

My name is Yoichiro Tanaka. I belong to the Platform Team of mixi, Inc. “mixi” is currently the most popular Japanese social networking service (SNS) and has more than 16.3 million registered users. I am happy to announce that we have released an open beta of “mixi apps, ” which is based on OpenSocial. The first release of the “mixi apps” container (runtime environment) was in last December, but this was only to select companies. However as of April 8th, we've opened the door to all developers!

Background

"mixi" was launched in February 2004 as one of the first social networking services in Japan. It lets users create profiles, make friends with other users, post diaries, discuss in several communities, share pictures and music with friends, etc.

In addition to those basic features, we have been developing the mixi Platform and working with our partners (service providers or developers) on enhancing the "mixi" service for users. “mixi apps” is one of our services which lets social application providers develop applications that use social graphs formed in mixi, and provide these applications to mixi users. To achieve this, we thought OpenSocial would be the best solution.

Supported Features

OpenSocial core APIs (People, Activities and Persistence).
The gadgets "core" and "feature-Specific" APIs (The gadgets APIs are mostly supported in the open beta with full support coming in the production release).
A mixi specific "Community API," which allows application access to mixi community (or group) information along with its members.

Upcoming Supported Features

OpenSocial's RESTful Protocol will be supported in the near future as "mixi Connect."
The mixi platform will also support a photo album API, among other APIs.

Timeline

Closed beta release - December 2008
Open beta release - Available now!
Consumer launch - first half of 2009

To learn more about mixi's new OpenSocial platform please visit:

http://developer.mixi.co.jp/ (Note: this site is in Japanese)

To support and engage our new mixi social applications development community, on April 23rd we will hold our first ever mixi OpenSocial developers conference, "mixi Appli Conference 2009." In addition to providing detailed information on how to build applications for "mixi apps," we will also talk about "mixi fund," which is a program that offers financial support to social application developers. More information on this conference can be found at:

http://mixi.co.jp/mixiappli-event/ (Note: this site is also in Japanese)

We believe our upcoming production release of "mixi apps" and overall support of the OpenSocial standards will enable us easily continue innovating on compelling future social services for our users.

Posted by Yoichiro Tanaka, mixi OpenSocial Architect

Important OAuth signing changes coming to a container near you

Sara — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:43:00 +0000

Although OAuth and OpenSocial make a powerful combination, it's important for developers to know specific implementation details for each container. If you're a developer using the OpenSocial REST and RPC protocols, either with the client libraries or by rolling-your-own implementation, we wanted to let you know about two fundamental changes coming to Shindig which are intended to simplify the implementation and use of OAuth.

First, using content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded in any client to server requests will be strictly prohibited. Instead, we recommend using application/json, application/xml, or application/atom+xml.

Second, in addition to the current method of body signing (which treats the entire body as a query parameter), a new implementation will be made available called the request body hash. Developers should use one method or the other, not both, on any given request. When available, the client libraries will default to using the request body hash.

Here's a bit of background on these changes:

In order to verify that requests sent by developers to OpenSocial containers are actually coming from a trusted source, they are cryptographically signed. The container verifies signature to check that the request originated from the developer and to ensure that the details of the request have not been intercepted or modified by a third party.

In most cases, this turns out just fine, but incompatibilities and inconsistencies arise when you happen to send a request containing "&" or "=" characters in the body, such as this request to update appdata:

[{"params":{"groupId":"@self","appId":"@app","userId":"@viewer","data":{"testkey":"a=b&b=c"},"fields":"testkey"},"id":"add","method":"appdata.update"}]

When such a body is sent along with a content-type of application/x-www-form-urlencoded, Java Shindig (following the Java servlet spec) assumes that the "&" and "=" characters delineate key/value pairs of form data (it's x-www-form-urlencoded after all). When these parameters are reordered and put together as part of the OAuth signing process, the new signature will not match the one sent by the developer (who treats the request body as one giant parameter instead of several, as intended). Thus, the request fails.

However, when the content-type of the request body is properly disclosed (application/json in this case), Java Shindig will treat the body as one parameter, thereby avoiding any conflicts with either the spec or the "&" and "=" characters. In addition, support for the request body hash does away with the non-standard behavior of putting the request body into the signature base string, substituting a hash in its place. It's quite elegant, and far simpler from an implementation standpoint.

For more history and discussion, see this thread in the OpenSocial and gadgets spec group.

What this means for you as a developer:

If you've been dreading the part where I say "go implement this in your code," fear not. We've released new versions of each of the client libraries (Java, PHP, Python, Ruby) which support the changes, while maintaining backwards compatibility.

Starting today, the iGoogle and orkut sandboxes are incorporating these changes to let you start testing right away

If you have any questions on the client library changes, feel free to ask in the client libraries group.

Posted by Dan Holevoet, Google Developer Programs

eBay announces Selling Manager Apps beta, opens up platform to gadget developers

Sara — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:24:00 +0000

My name is Farhang Kassaei, I am a platform architect at eBay.

We are very excited to announce that our Selling Manager (SM) suite of productivity tools is now offered as a gadget container - with the same extensibility technology behind OpenSocial. In other words, eBay Selling Manager is now OPEN as a beta platform to ALL developers. This is a great opportunity for developers to have direct access to professional sellers who manage their businesses on eBay.

With our beta platform launch today the SM sandbox is open to anyone with an eBay developer account. If you have not signed up for the eBay Developers Program yet, join for FREE at http://developer.ebay.com/join. If you are already a member of our developer community, visit http://developer.ebay.com/smapps for all the information you need to get started.

eBay will be opening up applications within Selling Manager to all sellers later this summer so this is the perfect time to get on board and get your application user-ready and tested. Also, don't forget to attend our annual Developer Conference in San Jose this June where we’ll be offering hands-on training for Selling Manager Applications. Visit our Developers Conference web site for more details.

Now, let me tell you a bit about the Selling Manager Apps. Although the SM apps are built on top of gadget specifications, they are not the typical OpenSocial applications (for one, eBay does not have a traditional traversable social graph). The SM Apps are productivity tools for eBay sellers, such as tools that allow sellers to manage customer questions more effectively, or to handle shipping and handling of sold items, or to identify and graph marketplace trends in pricing. Like any small business, eBay sellers value tools that make them more efficient and maximize their profitability.

What is most exciting about SM Apps is that you can make money. You choose how much you would like to charge for your applications and get paid by your subscribers. eBay handles billing your subscribers, processing their payments and distributing the funds to you thorough your PayPal account.

eBay is excited to be part of the OpenSocial/Gadget community. Our goal is to make development of commercial applications as open as developing social applications. Check out our Selling Manager beta platform hub at http://developer.ebay.com/smapps, and make sure to let us know how you think we’re doing.

Posted by Farhang Kassaei, Platform Architect, eBay

Japan’s goo home social network launches OpenSocial developer sandbox

Sara — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:06:00 +0000

My name is Eiji Kitamura, and I am the OpenSocial architect at "goo," one of the biggest portal sites in Japan with over 43 million unique visitors per month. I'm happy to announce that we've recently launched an OpenSocial developer sandbox for the "goo home" social network site (SNS).

The new goo developer sandbox is open to anyone, and we welcome developers to start building and testing OpenSocial applications on our platform. Please be advised however, that the site is in currently only in Japanese.

Background

"goo Home" originally launched in October 2007 with the goal of making the web more social. It lets users create a profile, build relationships with friends, and share all kinds of activities through blog posts, bookmarks, locations on map, videos, pictures, restaurant reviews, etc. However, when we launched these services in 2007, the technology was proprietary. Now, they are implemented using standard OpenSocial technologies!

OpenSocial Supported Features

Here are some details of the OpenSocial API support offered by goo:

Full support for core OpenSocial areas

AppData
People/Person
Activities

Gadget rendering support for 'home', 'profile', and 'canvas' views
Extensive privacy controls on personal attributes. (ex: not returning attributes when set as private by user)
Specific support for viral features:

requestCreateActivity(with permission control)

MediaItem supported

requestShareApp
requestPermission (requests one time permission for profile viewer's personal information)

Note: OpenSocial REST/RPC services are not yet supported, but we expect to support them in the near future.

In addition to general support of OpenSocial application development, we've expanded the social features in the following areas:

Added feed import functionality for 30 external services
Emoji (emoticon) support
opensocial-jquery support (courtesy of Nobuhiro Nakajima)

Launch Timeline

Developer Sandbox - Available now!
Consumer Launch - Late April, 2009

Getting Started

All OpenSocial developers who have a basic knowledge of Japanese can get started today by registering an account at goo's developer sandbox (http://developer.home.goo.ne.jp/).

On our developer site you'll also find plenty of helpful OpenSocial technical information with detailed documentation on our OpenSocial support. (Note: all content is in Japanese.)

We hope the support of OpenSocial standards in our new platform inspires new and uniquely Japanese innovations for the evolution of the social web!

Posted by Eiji Kitamura, Architect, NTT Resonant Inc.

Netlog’s first Developer Day – April 2, 2009 at Kinepolis in Brussels (Belgium)

Sara — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:30:00 +0000

Netlog is a fun community counting more than 40 million members all over the world. With more than 60% of our users between the ages of 14 and 24, we can also say that Netlog is the favourite place for many youths to meet online. We joined the OpenSocial initiative at the beginning of 2008, and since that time we have been improving our platform for users and developers alike. After more than a year on OpenSocial we have many stories to share.

If you'd like to learn from our team and from other developers who have been building great applications for Netlog users, here is an open invitation for you: on April 2nd we will be hosting our first Developer Day at Kinepolis in Brussels, Belgium. This is a one-day, free admission event.

We'll dedicate the morning to sharing information about our APIs, gaming platform, localization technology and monetization possibilities, and will also offer you a codelab in the afternoon.

Mark your calendar and start spreading the word! Email us at netlogday@netlog.com if you have any questions.

We'll be thrilled to have you join us. For more info, check out our blog post.

For more information about Netlog’s OpenSocial implementation go to http://en.netlog.com/go/developer/opensocial.

Update: For those interested in the codelab portion of Netlog's Developer Day, we wanted to provide some additional details. The Netlog team will be joined by members of the Google team for the afternoon codelab, and agencies such as BBDO and Thesedays will be showing how they integrated Netlog’s Brand Integration Platform into their clients’ online marketing strategies. BBDO and Thesedays will also share insights on how they succeeded in capturing the attention of Netlog's enthusiastic, young, active community.

Posted by Folke Lemaitre, VP Engineering, Netlog

Introducing the OpenSocial Development Environment

Sara — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:03:00 +0000

With the OpenSocial Development Environment (OSDE), you no longer need an online OpenSocial container environment to build your applications. OSDE is a new Eclipse plugin that lets you develop either OpenSocial JavaScript (gadget) client applications or OpenSocial Java client applications using OpenSocial 0.8's REST/RPC protocols, entirely within the Eclipse development environment.

OSDE is the creation of Yoichiro Tanaka, an expert software developer and leading pioneer in OpenSocial development from Japan. Yoichiro has also published a book on OpenSocial development in Japan.

Installing the OSDE plugin onto Eclipse 3.4.1 (or later) takes only minutes, and you can be up and running with a fully self-contained OpenSocial development environment. OSDE provides a complete social network environment in a single plugin, along with the necessary tools to easily manage your environment's social data. Additionally, you won't need to create multiple accounts on a social network for testing your applications. This can come in handy if you happen to feel inspired to create a new OpenSocial app while on a plane!

Architectural Highlights

OSDE is able to provide a complete, standalone development environment because it bundles the same code running on many OpenSocial containers today into a single Eclipse plug-in: for serving gadgets and OpenSocial data, Apache Shindig is bundled along with a compact Java H2 database, allowing for social data persistence. OSDE also uses Hibernate for Java Object Relational mapping of the OpenSocial data entities: people, activities, and data. Plus, OSDE bundles the OpenSocial Java client library so its wizards can quickly generate runnable Java client applications that use OpenSocial's REST/RPC protocols.

Feature Highlights

OSDE also includes development features that greatly enhance OpenSocial development:

OpenSocial project creator wizards for both JavaScript/gadget client apps, as well as Java client applications that use the REST/RPC protocols.
A re-entrant gadget specification editor that enables efficient editing of OpenSocial gadget properties, views, locale settings, user preferences as well as gadget and spec/JavaScript source code.
An OpenSocial console view that shows the console output of the local Shindig/H2 social engine, as well as tabbed views for directly managing the onboard People, Activities and AppData persisted social data.

OSDE users can use the social database console to edit their own custom social data (such as people, friend relationships, activities etc.), or they can simply load the sample social data that comes with Apache Shindig's 'Sample Container' application.

For more information on how to use OSDE, checkout the OSDE tutorial (which includes a screencast) and visit the OSDE homepage.

Posted by Chris Schalk, Google Developer Advocate