Google Data

Posted by Shawn Shen, Developer Programs

A few weeks ago we posted a survey to collect feedback from the community to help improve the OpenSocial ecosystem. We are very grateful for all the responses and also appreciate your continued involvement in shaping OpenSocial. I'd like to share a brief summary of our findings.



Preferred Timeline & Location of Future OpenSocial events

Across the globe more than 65% of respondents prefer OpenSocial events sooner than later (i.e. July through October '08; see graph).



All regions are well represented with these regional preferences: North America (45%), Asia-Pacific (45%), Europe/the Middle East/Africa (34%) and South America (21%). This is not surprising, as there have been a wide variety of OpenSocial hackathons and events in the US, UK, the Netherlands, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, China, and in Korea. Google, too, recently had a very successful Beijing Hackathon, hot on the heels of Google Developer Day China. This month, we also held OpenSocial codelabs and seminars in Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Mexico, and Brazil, with many more planned in September & October as part of Google Developer Days 2008). So stay tuned worldwide for many more events from the larger OpenSocial community.



Preferred Event Formats

More than 70% of the respondents are interested in a general OpenSocial summit or summit combined with a hackathon (see graph), indicating developers' preference for active engagement in and frequent updates about OpenSocial's evolution.




Popular Containers

Early adopters that are in either full production or sandbox, namely hi5, MySpace, orkut and iGoogle, made this list, though the list is augmented by 13 other containers, showing the breadth of OpenSocial's reach.



Preferred Language

95% of the respondents use JavaScript while 56% and 31% prefer PHP and Java respectively, with Ruby and Python not far behind.



Documentation

While 54% of the respondents were either satisfied or very satisfied with OpenSocial documentation, 28% reported being "not sure" and 19% felt dissatisfied, which indicates there remains room for continued improvement in detailed API documentation, production-ready sample code, feature specific tutorials, Shindig documentation, cross-container reference, and wiki-enabled content sharing. We are currently rolling out OpenSocial wiki resources, and we will provide more updates as we continue to improve our documentation.



An extra hand

More than 80% of the respondents use the OpenSocial group for help, and more than 50% receive help from the orkut developer forum while 19%, 14% and 13% of the respondents also use hi5, iGoogle, and MySpace forums respectively.

Once again, in pursuing our common goal to make the web more open and social, I'd like to thank the developer community for your continued support, unbounded energy and unrelenting enthusiasm, as evidenced in this comment from a developer in Korea, "Go! Go! Go! Opensocial!"