Recent OpenSocial launches and spec evolution
October 3rd, 2008 | Published in Google OpenSocial
Looking over the broad OpenSocial community, September was a very active month. In particular, there have been numerous OpenSocial deployments:
We've also seen a lot of progress on the evolution of the OpenSocial spec and related docs:
- 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
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