• Key use cases and requirements driving social business
• Technologies that can be standardized to solve the problems facing social business
• Overall architecture of social business interoperability needs
• The difference between standards inside the enterprise and across enterprises
• Organic approaches that are evolving without standardization, such as user engagement and custom integration designs
• Next steps for evolved social specifications, ranging from OpenSocial to the Federated Social Web

• Make #hashtags come alive using Apache Rave and OpenSocial! ( http://na.apachecon.com/schedule/presentation/196/ ) presented on Monday, February 25th at 1:30pm by John Mertic and Mark Weitzel. We will take a deep dive into how to build integrations into Apache Rave using SugarCRM. Then, we'll see how that same integration can also be deployed on other OpenSocial containers, such as IBM Connections and Jive.
• OpenSocial Embedded Experiences with ActivityStrea.ms in Apache Rave ( http://na.apachecon.com/schedule/presentation/143/ ) presented on Tuesday, February 26th at 5:00pm by Matt Franklin. This presentation will show how you can take advantage of the OpenSocial support in Rave to build a stream-based user interface that offers situational awareness via ActivityStrea.ms and in-context interaction with via Embedded Experiences.

TemboSocial, for example, has added peer recognition to IBM Connections and integrates into the activity stream and provides OpenSocial embedded apps . ISW who has built a gamification layer for IBM Connections has also taken advantage of the OpenSocial integration points. AppFusions has also used OpenSocial to integrate Atlassian's JIRA, Confluence and Stash with IBM Connections as shown in the demo below.

And there's plenty plenty more! In fact there's over 200 partners attending the Ready for Social Business Showcase at the IBM Connect reference.

With the #IBMConnect conference just a few days away, it's likely more app developers will start taking advantage of this as well. At the conference, there will be an App Dev Throwdown where 14 companies. The winner will be featured during Wednesday morning's keynote.

The conference is also a great opportunity to get even more app developers on board. At the IBM Connect conference, app developers can take advantage of the following sessions to learn how to use OpenSocial within the enterprise. Here's a list of all the App Dev and/or OpenSocial related sessions at the conference. Make sure you add them to your calendar:

• AD101: Social Applications Made Easy with the New Social Business Toolkit SDK
• AD103 : Social Standards Across IBM Connections, IBM Notes, IBM iNotes and IBM Domino
• AD104: IBM Connections Activity Stream Integration with OpenSocial
• AD206 : IBM Lotus Domino XPages: Embrace, Extend, Integrate
• AD212 : Whats New in IBM Lotus Notes Widgets and LiveText: Linking Your Data to the World!
• AD405: Empower your Social Business with SAP Processes in the Activity Stream
• AD407: Qualifying Round for App Dev Throwdown I
• AD408: Qualifying Round for App Dev Throwdown II
  
• BP209 : In The Land of Social Apps, the API is King
• CUST108: How 3M Integrated SAP into the Activity Stream Using OpenSocial
• ID101 : What's New in IBM iNotes 9.0 Social Edition
• INV110: App Dev Strategy: Coding Social Business Applications
• INV211 : The New Social Business Paradigm with OpenSocial
• INV213: The Roadmap for Enterprise Social: From Social Email to Universal Activity Streams
• JMP102 : Extending Your App Arsenal With OpenSocial
• JMP202: Extending IBM Connection to Build an Exceptional Social Learning Platform
• SHOW301: Becoming a Connections Developer: Lessons from the Field

As you can see, with IBM's backing of OpenSocial 2.0, OpenSocial continues to take over the enterprise!

IBM Connect

• INV211 : The New Social Business Paradigm with OpenSocial
• AD103 : Social Standards Across IBM Connections, IBM Notes, IBM iNotes and IBM Domino
• AD206 : IBM Lotus Domino XPages: Embrace, Extend, Integrate
• AD212 : Whats New in IBM Lotus Notes Widgets and LiveText: Linking Your Data to the World!
• ID101 : What's New in IBM iNotes 9.0 Social Edition
• BP209 : In The Land of Social Apps, the API is King
• JMP102 : Extending Your App Arsenal With OpenSocial

ApacheCon NA

• Make #hashtags come alive using Apache Rave and OpenSocial! - http://na.apachecon.com/schedule/presentation/196/
• OpenSocial Embedded Experiences with ActivityStrea.ms in Apache Rave - http://na.apachecon.com/schedule/presentation/143/
  

CeBIT 2013 - Hannover, Germany

So, how does it work?

• Adding new players
• Authenticating players
• Calling player stats
• Calling general country, energy, and date stats
• Initiating a race session
• Obtaining the stats for a unique race session
• Polling for available races

Taapi & OpenSocial

Learn More!

Open season for innovation

Bridging gaps between the apps

Potential to turn email into a structured, real-time platform

What’s next?

Andrew Filev (@andrewsthoughts)
Andrew Filev is a software entrepreneur with more than 10 years of experience in project and product management. He is the founder and CEO of Wrike, a Silicon Valley-based provider of project management and collaboration software. To learn more about Andrew and his views, you can subscribe to his Project Management 2.0 blog or follow him on Twitter (@andrewsthoughts).

• Building social applications and containers using Shindig and OpenSocial.
• The vast array of features and functionality within the OpenSocial specification.
• Front-end code security tools like Caja and ADsafe.
• Authentication systems with OpenID
• Authorization systems with OAuth 1.0a and 2.0
• Emerging social technologies like Activity Streams, Open Graph Protocol, PubSubHubbub, Salmon and others.

Jonathan LeBlanc (@jcleblanc)
Jonathan LeBlanc is a principal developer evangelist with X.commerce. Jonathan has been a member of the OpenSocial community for over three years and is the author of O'Reilly's "Programming Social Applications".

• Activity Streams support: Activity Stream provides a mechanism for defining rich and detailed social activities, defined in a simple actor / object / target format. The adoption of this open specification allows OpenSocial to not only provide richer data sources but also to be interoperable with more open streams.


• Deprecated support for ATOM: It was determined that the ATOM serialization format for OpenSocial information was not being utilized in practice. Since there were a number of adjacent specification utilizing JSON for the preferred data format, the community has decided to deprecate support for ATOM.


• Simplified gadget format: Providing a mechanism for embedding template libraries into a gadget specification file, the ability to integrate data pipelining and templating features within a gadget has been greatly simplified.


• Embedded Experiences: The community saw a need to provide a mechanism for providing embedded experiences directly within the gadget. By integrating these features, the content host is able to tell a service how to render its content instead of having the service figure it out themselves. This will provide a higher degree of control over data in a gadget.


• New Incubating API
  
  
  
  • OAuth 2 support: The OpenSocial 2.0 specification now includes support for OAuth 2. Since the OAuth 2.0 specification has not been finalized by the time of this release, OAuth 2 support is currently in an incubating mode. Currently revision 20 of the OAuth 2 specification is being integrated. Support for OAuth 1.0a is still included in the OpenSocial 2.0 specification and has not been deprecated.
  
  
  • Common Container: In OpenSocial 2.0, a new optional specification has been added for a common container API. The goal is to simplify the container and gadget integration model. It provides a set of common services that Container developers can leverage for features like in-browser Gadget lifecycle event callbacks, embedded experiences, and selection and action handlers.

• Release notes.
• OpenSocial specifications.
• Full list of the published features in version 2.

Along with releasing the OpenSocial 2.0 spec today, the OpenSocial Foundation is working together with our members companies, and implementor friends at Shindig are proud to announce the availability of the first OpenSocial 2.0 Container, running the latest Shindig 3.0 build, the Open Social Sandbox, at http://sandbox.opensocial2.org:8080/. The site is a live demo of the latest features of the OpenSocial 2.0 spec including Embedded Experiences, Declarative Actions, OpenSearch and powerful new open gadgets APIs to enable gadgets to jump out of the box. The site provides tutorials, demo videos and is geared towards enabling gadget developers immediately to build new gadgets, and test them out on the site through the "Customize" button.

Jonathan LeBlanc (@jcleblanc)
Jonathan LeBlanc is a principal developer evangelist with X.commerce. Jonathan has been a member of the OpenSocial community for over three years and is the author of O'Reilly's "Programming Social Applications".

• The container that you are using does not support OpenSocial version 0.9 or later.
• The container that you are using does not support data pipelining or templating.

• We will use data pipelining to load in the headlines from Reddit.
• The URL of the data pipe will be a dynamic call to the Yahoo! Query Language (YQL). YQL will be used to scrape the HTML from the page, then use an xpath to drill down to the repeating anchor tags that denote the headlines.
• Lastly, from the JSON data that is returned back from YQL into the data pipe, we're going to use OpenSocial templating to display out the headline results.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<Module>

   <ModulePrefs title="Reddit Headline Fetch"

      title_url="http://www.jcleblanc.com"

      description="Obtains reddit.com headlines via YQL"

      author="Jonathan LeBlanc">

      <Require feature="opensocial-0.9"/>

      <Require feature="opensocial-data" />

      <Require feature="opensocial-templates" />

   </ModulePrefs>

   <Content type="html">

   <![CDATA[

   <script type="text/os-data" xmlns:os="http://ns.opensocial.org/2008/markup">

      <os:HttpRequest key="reddit" href="http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?

      q=select%20*%20from%20html%20where%20url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com

      %22%20and%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20xpath%3D'%2F%2Fa%5B%40class%3D%22title%22%5D'

      &format=json"/>

   </script>

   <script type="text/os-template" require="reddit">

      <ul>

         <li repeat="${reddit.content.query.results.a}">

            <a href="${Cur.href}">${Cur.content}</a>

         </li>

      </ul>

   </script>

   ]]>

   </Content>

</Module>

   <Require feature="opensocial-0.9"/>

   <Require feature="opensocial-data" />

   <Require feature="opensocial-templates" />

   <script type="text/os-data" xmlns:os="http://ns.opensocial.org/2008/markup">

   <os:HttpRequest key="reddit" href="http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?

   q=select%20*%20from%20html%20where%20url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com

   %22%20and%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20xpath%3D'%2F%2Fa%5B%40class%3D%22title%22%5D'

   &format=json"/>

   </script>

• The public YQL URL: http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql
• q: The YQL query to run, placed as a query string parameter.
• format: The format to return our data in, in our case JSON. This is also placed as a query string parameter.

  SELECT * FROM html WHERE url="http://www.reddit.com"

  AND xpath='//a[@class="title"]'

<script type="text/os-template" require="reddit">

<ul>

   <li repeat="${reddit.content.query.results.a}">

      <a href="${Cur.href}">${Cur.content}</a>

   </li>

</ul>

</script>

Jonathan LeBlanc (@jcleblanc)
Jonathan LeBlanc is a principal developer evangelist with X.commerce. Jonathan has been a member of the OpenSocial community for over three years and is the author of O'Reilly's "Programming Social Applications".

As a follow on to the efforts shown at the OpenSocial SOTU, we brought the Open App Revolution to IBM Innovate (The Rational Software Conference). Innovate is IBM Rational's annual conference for software and product delivery. It was held this year in Orlando, FL from June 5th through 9th. Matt Marum (IBM) was at Innovate this year demonstrating a cool social integration using Rational application lifecycle management tools within the Jazz Interoperability Center of the exhibit hall.

Matt demonstrated how a single embedded experience OpenSocial gadget could be created that would work with multiple Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools through the use of the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC). OSLC is an open community for developing standards to make integrating lifecycle tools easier . In the demonstration, he showed how ActivityStream activities could be generated from ALM tools using social rules to sort out business relevant activity. 

These activities are then posted to an activity stream which was displayed within an enterprise morning report OpenSocial application running on an iPad and iPhone. The mobile device user could then interact with the underlying ALM resources using an embedded experience without switching contexts away from their social application. Leveraging open standards, he demonstrated the end to end scenario working on Rational Team Concert and Rational ClearQuest. He was also showed the embedded experience working with Rational Quality Manager and Rational Requirements Composer.
Even better, by using OpenSocial gadgets it all ran within a Jazz Dashboard and potentially any other OpenSocial container. Here is a preview video put together just before Innovate. Products shown are Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager, Rational Requirements Composer, and Rational ClearQuest.

The demonstration was a big success! Attendees were excited by the opportunities of the social integration to change how they and their users work every day. This work is still at the "proof of concept" stage. However, you can track the progress of the work and get involved by following the OpenSocial spec list and Apache Shindig code base.

Viva La OpenAppRevolution!

Post on behalf of Matt Marum, Senior Engineer, IBM, by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation

• An introduction to OpenSocial
• Getting started with Apache Shindig
• ActivityStreams integration with OpenSocial
• How to use the new Pub/Sub feature in OpenSocial 1.1

• An introduction to OpenSocial
• Getting started with Apache Shindig
• ActivityStreams integration with OpenSocial
• How to use the new Pub/Sub feature in OpenSocial 1.1

Eureka Streams, initially built internally, is now being made available
under the Apache License as open source. Shindig version 1.1 (beta)
integration provides the framework to offer the OpenSocial 0.9
features, creating a user focused OpenSocial gadget container that can
access the user profiles and activity data created within the tool.
The UI has been developed using Google Web Toolkit to provide a
flexible JavaScript front end developed in Java.

Eureka Streams is currently released to open source at version
0.9. The team has placed a heavy focus on user interaction,
performance, and scalability to this point, but is shifting their
focus to the developer and looking for support from the open source
community.

For more information and to learn how to get started, please visit the Eureka Streams web site.

Posted on behalf of Steve Terlecki, Lockheed Martin Corp, by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation

We’d like to share a little bit about why we adopted the OpenSocial platform for our new online service, called Workbench (http://network.nature.com/workbench), but first we should probably fill in some details about who we are.

Founded in 1869 as a vehicle for reporting the grand results of scientific work and discovery, Nature (www.nature.com) is one of the most distinguished scientific publishers in the world. Nature exists to be a scientific communications company, and back in 1869 the best way to achieve that goal was to publish a periodical. Nowadays, if you were to start with that mission you would most likely start on the Internet.

Nature Network (http://network.nature.com/) is our domain-specific network for researchers. Our intention with Nature Network is to not only provide a platform where scientists can create an online presence and interact with each other, but also to bring interesting information and functionality to scientists. There are a few advantages to having a domain-specific network over a generic network. First of all, it allows the emergence of community norms, i.e. tone of voice, that are fit for that specific community. Also, by creating and hosting our own network, we have the chance to connect the research literature with the social activity around that literature. We have started, for example, to link our academic papers to blog posts that mention those papers, and we have many plans going forward to extend these kinds of connections.

While working on upgrading our site over the last year, we decided to build in an API and so became interested in OpenSocial. Obviously, since Nature Network promotes social connections, OpenSocial was a contender straight away. We wanted to be able to host interesting functionality on our site and the gadget specification is perfect for that.

Our redevelopment process happened in Java, and again that was a great fit with the Shindig project. Being able to see an active developer community around the standard and around the reference implementation was also a major factor in our decision. Our developers found it easy to integrate Shindig with the code that we were creating and they did this quickly as an early prototype. Seeing our wireframes turn into a live demo was a great moment - it was at the point that we took the decision to go with OpenSocial.

We are planning to open our gadget platform and API to external developers so that all the exciting activity that is happening within Nature Network finds its way to anyone who is interested.

To summarise, we wanted to be able to create an API and offer gadgets to our users. OpenSocial provided a great answer to both of those needs. As we continue to evolve and add capability to the Workbench, we are planning to open our gadget platform and API to external developers so that we can build an ecosystem based on open standards around all the exciting activity that is happening within Nature Network. The ongoing development and great documentation that exists have given us confidence in the project and we are excited by the direction that OpenSocial is heading.

Please feel free to drop us a note with your questions. Contact us via e-mail, network at nature.com.
Nature Network Team

Nature Network is the professional networking website for scientists around the world. It’s an online meeting place where you and your colleagues can gather, share and discuss ideas, and keep in touch. It’s also where you can consult the community for answers to scientific questions or offer your expertise to help others. Additionally, using the Workbench, you can collate your online scientific tools together in a customizable workspace, allowing you to group your most important tools and information in the way that works best for you.

Posted on behalf of the Nature Network Team by Mark Weitzel, Secretary, OpenSocial Foundation

On behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation, I would like to thank everyone that attended the State of the Union event. A special thank you to the wonderful team at MySpace for arranging and hosting this event. With the participation of about a hundred at he event, I am confident we can move the standard forward.

If you missed it, you can check out the slides for the event. Here a quick summary of some of the key topics we discussed:

• We have new Board members and great energy (Welcome Cody Simms from Yahoo! and Jason Gary from IBM). Also, please take advantage of the 2 community seats available. Nominations are open and any member of the OpenSocial Foundation is welcome to participate.
• It is exciting to see OpenSocial adoption outside of “traditional” Social networks and into domain specific networks and even major enterprise vendors.
• We seek your help in giving our foundation’s pages/navigation an uplift. Feel free to jump in and add your ideas.
• OpenSocial 1.0 next--Here's what's on tap: improvements to the existing OAuth implementation, inter-gadget communication, and views for Mobile devices. We also need to pay attention to the development & spec process. Our goal is to get prototypes and spec patches in now, followed by a tight, well controlled, editing cycle.
• The board is excited about engaging OpenSocial’s worldwide community. We are looking to sponsor events outside the U.S. and will be working on figuring this out over the next few weeks.

Here are some more details below about the event. Please feel add your thoughts & suggestions as comments to this blog post.

The event started off with introductions of the Foundation Board members and officers. Cody Simms is Yahoo!’s corporate designate. IBM is a new corporate member and has designated Jason Gary as their representatives. Welcome Cody and Jason. The complete list of your Foundation Officers and Board Members is in the FAQs.

In addition to new corporate members of the OpenSocial Foundation Board, there are two community seats available. Anyone is able to serve on the board. The only requirement to nominate or hold the position is that you must be a member of the OpenSocial Foundation. There are no membership fees to join OpenSocial. All you need to do is fill out a simple on-line membership application.

It’s been an exciting year and a half for OpenSocial! We’ve seen continued adoption of the specification as new containers come on line. Perhaps what is more interesting is that we are starting to see OpenSocial adoption outside of “traditional” social networks. This includes adoption by enterprise vendors such as Jive, Atlassian, and IBM.

Before getting into the heart of the discussion, we reviewed our current Web presence. Right now, we’ve got information buried on existing pages, scattered across different sites, and in general, have an inconsistent way of engaging our members. As a result, we are going to start looking at how to clean this up. Please post a note to the community group list if you’d like to help with this effort. There’s also a wiki page to capture your ideas.

Looking ahead for the remainder of this year and into next, we’ve got some exciting things starting to happen. First of all, we agreed on the scope and timeline for “OpenSocial 1.0 next”. There were three areas that we’d like to start working on for the next version of the spec; improvements to the existing OAuth implementation, inter-gadget communication, and views for Mobile devices. There’s already some code for intergadget communication in Shindig, and the team from Mixi has put together a good starting point for Mobile.

We will be following the development process and incorporating the extensions mechanism that we outlined last year. This means that we should be able to accept patches to the spec and prototypes now! Our goal is to get prototypes and spec patches in now, followed by a tight, well controlled, editing cycle. Ideally, this gives us time to try out the prototypes now, rather than actually developing and prototyping the new features at the same time we are writing the spec. The specification process and extension process will be updated in the next few days to reflect these ideas.

It is also worth noting is that we’d like to get as many of these prototypes as possible into Shindig so it’s easy for people to try them out. Paul Linder and the Shindig community has done a great job over the last few months of refactoring and organizing the code to make this much easier. Thanks to Paul and the Shindig committers!

One of the original goals of OpenSocial was to create a community that could rapidly prototype new ideas. With the development process, the extensions mechanism, and Shindig, we’ve got all the pieces in place to do just that. An example of this is the work that has been done to provide a prototype of the ActivityStrea.ms specification.

But we don’t want to stop there! A number of new and exciting ideas in the social Web space are emerging, and as a community, we should be prototyping them as quickly as possible to understand their impact to OpenSocial. Examples of these include Salmon, Pubsubhubbub, Web Finger, and OAuth 2.0. Let’s get prototypes going now so that when these specs become final, it’s easy for us to provide an open source implementation and a clean path into OpenSocial spec. This way, we can move the entire industry forward—together—faster.

So far, most (if not all), of the ‘official’ OpenSocial Foundation sponsored events have been located in the United States. One of our goals for this year is to change that. A number of members have expressed interest in having events in Asia and Europe. This is a great way for our community to engage the large number of world wide container providers and businesses that are successfully implementing OpenSocial. The Board is very excited about reaching out to our worldwide membership and is looking forward to helping the community make this happen.

Thank you, once again, to the team at MySpace. There were great to work with and put on a fantastic event. I would also like to thank our community. It’s because of you that we had a great event.

Now let’s get prototyping!

Posted by Mark Weitzel, on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation