It’s the final countdown…to launching orkut apps for Europe
February 21st, 2008 | Published in Google Orkut
No, not that Europe!
It's easy to get our signals crossed, so we're launching this blog as a new channel for communicating features, bug fixes, sandbox status and other information directly to orkut developers. And what better subject matter for the first post than our plans for launching your OpenSocial apps on orkut?
We've seen some great application submissions and received a lot of feedback from developers at hackathons, in the developer forums, and in the public issue tracker. We're still working, but we're aiming to get our first release candidate (RC) on the sandbox this Friday, February 22. Here's a list of issues we plan to have fixed in the initial RC:
- Apps aren't rendering in IE - This is priority numero uno and will likely make it into the sandbox before Friday.
- Unable to fetch a Person by ID
- URL parameters sent to requestNavigateTo() are parsed incorrectly
- Signed requests are passing the wrong owner ID
- If a user hasn't set their profile photo, the API returns a bad URL.
You might have noticed that user-to-user messaging didn't make the short list. We know this is really important to application developers, and we're working to integrate this smoothly into the orkut user experience. Keep an eye on this blog--we'll be posting our plans for implementing this functionality soon.
Once the first RC is live on the sandbox, we'll need orkut developers (that's you!) to start kicking the tires. We'll post on this blog and in the developer forum and give you a 3 day window to continue developing your apps (and report any issues). Then we'll spend a couple days fixing any issues that you or our QA team finds.
After this 5-day trial period, if we're confident that the RC meets our quality bar we'll start rolling out OpenSocial apps to orkut users. We're going to start with a small number of English-speaking users (in Europe) and ramp up traffic over the following week or so.
We'll continue to update this blog with our progress. If you have any questions along the way, please post them in the orkut developer forum.
We're really excited to offer all the apps you've been building to orkut users. Let's work together through this final push to get your applications onto millions of profiles around the world.