At yesterday's OpenSocial Summit, imeem (www.imeem.com) announced that it has launched as a new OpenSocial container. imeem is the 3rd largest and one of the fastest growing social networks in the U.S., with over 24 million unique user visits per month. The site enables users to discover, interact and express themselves with all types of online media. Through the Media Platform, imeem now provides OpenSocial developers access to its extensive library of music, videos, and photos for their applications, which can be accessed using imeem's extension of OpenSocial.
We are happy to welcome imeem and its community to the OpenSocial application development platform. For more information, please visit imeem's OpenSocial developer site.
imeem launches support for OpenSocial sandbox
Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 11:27:00 AM
Friend Connect means more users for OpenSocial apps and containers
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 10:01:00 PM
With yesterday's announcement of Google Friend Connect, making any website into a social website is now much easier. Website owners can paste a small bit of JavaScript into their site, adding social features for their users without having to write any code themselves.
For OpenSocial application developers, this gives you a whole new audience for your apps, beyond the hundreds of millions of users on existing social networks that support OpenSocial.
For OpenSocial containers, this makes your users' friend relationships more valuable by bringing them to other sites they visit and enlivens your activity streams with actions from their friends on these sites.
When I go out to talk to website developers about OpenSocial, I ask the question:
"Who here has written user registration code?"
- a lot of hands go up
"And who enjoyed it?"
- most hands go down.
To add personal or social features, websites need to know information about their users and their friends, but gathering and storing this is a lot of extra work. Prompting people to enter their information over and over again, for every site they visit, becomes tedious, often causing visitors to abandon the sites.
By abstracting out the ability to discover social information, OpenSocial enables web developers to write social applications that draw upon existing trusted sources that have become OpenSocial containers. However, up until now, becoming a container - adding new social applications for your users - has meant having to provide your own source of personal and social information. By using securely authenticated APIs from existing social sites, Friend Connect means any website can host OpenSocial apps.
In the future, Friend Connect will call the RESTful API for containers that support OpenSocial v0.8, helping their users share their web-wide experiences with each other on their favorite social site.
Friend Connect uses three open standards to connect to other websites. It uses OpenID for identity and logging in, it uses OAuth to authorize access to friend and profile data on existing sites that host it, and it uses OpenSocial to embed the applications within your site.
Making the web more social through the use of open standards is what OpenSocial is all about - have a look at example Friend Connected sites like www.ingridmichaelson.com and www.bibleapps.com. To find more details about the preview release, or to sign up as a test site, go to google.com/friendconnect/.
Wednesday's OpenSocial Summit: Detailed Agenda
Friday, May 09, 2008 at 6:45:00 PM
As a follow-up to the post earlier this week, we're now only a few days away from the OpenSocial Summit happening on Wednesday, May 14th at the Googleplex (1400 Crittenden).
We're looking forward to discussing the draft proposal for OpenSocial v0.8, which includes a RESTful API, as well as diving deep on topics such as App Building Best Practices, Security with OAuth and Caja, and brainstorming about a templating language for OpenSocial.
To get a better sense for the flow of the event, and for your planning purposes, you're welcome to review the OpenSocial Summit's detailed agenda.
The doors open at 9:30am with a light breakfast, and the event kicks off at 10:00am. The event is entirely free (we'll provide food, drinks and wifi) -- all you need to bring are your ideas and potentially a laptop.
You can visit the RSVP form to let us know you'll be coming.
OpenSocial Apps and Containers at Google I/O
Thursday, May 08, 2008 at 10:52:00 PM
If you've taken a look at the Google I/O website recently, you may have noticed a number of new sessions by OpenSocial app and container developers. There are now over 15 OpenSocial sessions posted, and over 80 sessions in general. A couple of the new sessions posted include:
OpenSocial, OpenID, and OAuth: Oh, My!:
Joseph Smarr of Plaxo will discuss how OpenId and OAuth can be used with OpenSocial for seamless and efficient identification and authentication.
Apache Shindig - Make Your Social Site an OpenSocial Container:
Dan Peterson from Google will join Paul Linder of hi5, and Chris Chabot to introduce you to the Apache Shindig project, explain how to integrate Shindig with your social site, and show you a demo of the code.
OpenSocial - Scaling and Analytics, Nuts and Bolts:
Nat Brown, CTO of iLike.com, will give an overview of iLike's infrastructure and the places they have invested to make the syndication of their social gadgets quick and easy.
Building on the Promise of OpenSocial
Jeremiah Robison, CTO of Slide, will be speaking on best practices for delivering multiple applications on multiple OpenSocial containers, including addressing architecture, data segmentation, and differences in networks.
Monetizing Application Traffic On Social Networks
Sourabh Niyogi, co-founder and VP of Engineering at Social Media Networks, will be talking about his experiences in growing, monetizing, and measuring traffic.
OpenSocial at MySpace - Implementing the Container:
Chris Bissell, Chief Software Architect of MySpace, will explain the architecture of the MySpace OpenSocial container including how it manages data requests and how it addresses scalability issues.
The event is now less than three weeks away (May 28 - 29). Don't forget to register soon if you haven't already. For those coming from out of town, we've arranged discounted room rates at nearby hotels. Read the details on the website to take advantage of the discount.
See you soon in San Francisco.
OpenSocial Summit: May 14th, at the Googleplex
Monday, May 05, 2008 at 6:01:00 PM
On Wednesday, May 14th, we're hosting an OpenSocial Summit at the Googleplex (1400 Crittenden Lane) in Mountain View.
There has been a lot happening with OpenSocial since the last event at Six Apart in San Francisco, and we're eager to get folks together to talk about experiences so far, and brainstorm about the future. The main topics for the summit include:
- Discuss the proposed OpenSocial v0.8 spec
- Review the state of the OpenSocial RESTful API
- Discuss the design for an OpenSocial Templating language
- Brainstorm ideas for future iterations of the OpenSocial spec
- Updates from containers such as hi5, iGoogle, MySpace, and orkut
Of course, there will also be a good environment for coding, and people around to help. In addition, we'll walk through a tutorial for those just getting started.
If you have OpenSocial questions, this is a great place to ask. The summit will start at 10am; food, drinks, and wifi will be provided.
Please RSVP for the summit!
OpenSocial Developer Interview: Charles Ying from Pixverse
Monday, April 28, 2008 at 9:58:00 PM
In march hi5 and MySpace deployed OpenSocial to all their users and OpenSocial started to gain some real traction with developers. Here is a video interview with Charles Ying from PixVerse from March 15th at the hi5 bi-national hackathon in Mountain View. Charles talks about PixWall, an example application they built to demonstrate the power of their Flash Physics engine. Since we did this interview last month, PixWall has seen significant growth and they have been adding servers to meet the demand. They also translated it into Portuguese and Spanish using the OpenSocial Internationalization extensions, with some help from fellow OpenSocial developers and hi5.
Charles Ying, PixVerse
A few excerpts:
What is PixVerse
"PixVerse is a next generation virtual world company"
About the OpenSocial API"What is interesting about OpenSocial, lot of fun things, we're javascript folks so it was easy. If you are a FaceBook developer it is a different philosophy but it is possible to do. Once you've run on OpenSocial it runs on all networks. Cross platform UI design is important to consider."
About PixWall"PixWall is an experiment with our engine, a real time bulletin board in 2D, post notes on a bulletin board in real time, if anyone else is looking at your board at the same time you can interact in real time. We have many more to come which I cannot talk about."
Technology used"PixWall uses a Flash client with a built in 2D physics engine, 50k of Flash, data driven, all ui driven by backend servers. Servers are lock-free concurrent engines, we built a smaller language on the client side for the game logic. We have our own servers, everything is virtual, we use Amazon S3 for storage, the new YouTube Atom API, MySpace TV, Photobucket, integrate all these web services. Our servers are all written in Python, completely asynchronous backend server, very scalable, 12k users, hit 1% load on one machine. Designed to scale horizontally."
Fun story"Guys at hi5 wanted to demo PixWall at GSP conference in San Diego, Orkut guys as well (that was me:-). Porting to orkut: 10 minutes to get an account, 50 minutes to port from hi5 to orkut. Next week myspace hackathon, port hi5 to myspace, took 90 minutes, more ui. It is a testament to how good the platform is."
And here is a video of Charles's demonstration of PixWall at the end of the hackathon.
OpenSocial Updates: MySpace, orkut, App Engine, makeRequest, oh my!
Sunday, April 27, 2008 at 12:14:00 PM
Now that I’m back from OpenSocial’s London Hackathon (write-up, pics), and meeting fellow Shindig folks at ApacheCon EU, I wanted to take a moment to highlight some important happenings in the community:
- Just a few days ago, MySpace’s apps gallery went out of beta, which means more apps in front of more users.
- At Web 2.0 Expo, Lou Moore from hi5 gave an interesting presentation about Implementing an OpenSocial Container.
- Earlier this week, iGoogle launched a developer sandbox, which supports OpenSocial, a new UI, and a “canvas” page.
- Little more than a week ago, orkut.com launched OpenSocial in India, which gets OpenSocial out to 10% of their users.
- Looking forward, the technical details for OpenSocial version 0.8 are coming together on the specification discussion group.
In addition to launch updates, we’ve had some interesting additions to the technical resources available for app developers:
- If you’re taking advantage of the OpenSocial Persistence layer, you should check out this new requesting data article by Jason Cooper.
- If you’re building an app that uses a remote datastore, you should check out Arne Rooman-Kurrik’s article about using gadgets.io.makeRequest.
- For those of you previewing Google App Engine, you should check out Lane LiaBraaten’s article that shows you how to power an OpenSocial app with Google App Engine.
If you’re looking to learn more about OpenSocial, for those of you in South America, there are a lot of events coming up in the next 2 weeks in Argentina and Brazil. Also, everyone should definitely check out what is happening on the “Social” track of Google I/O, coming up on May 28 and 29 in San Francisco.
Update: fixed a typo in Lane's name.
