OpenSocial API Blog

Announcing the Worldwide Ning Appathon Competition

2009-11-06T08:28:00.000-08:00

Let the games begin! At last night's Ning Appathon kickoff event at the Ning offices in Palo Alto, Ning started a week-long worldwide app development competition for the recently launched Ning Apps platform.

WHAT: The Ning Appathon is a week-long OpenSocial development competition with prizes for both original and ported applications. Judges include Ning Chairman and Co-founder Marc Andreessen, Wired magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson and Managing Director of building43 Robert Scoble.

WHERE: The competition is open to participants worldwide. Visit the Ning Developer Network for details and Ning Apps documentation.

WHEN: The competition began at our kickoff event on November 5th. All entries must be submitted via http://developer.ning.com/appathon by 10 p.m. Pacific on Thursday, November 12th.

PRIZES: The Grand Prize for Best Original App is $5,000 (US). The Grand Prize for Best Ported App is $4,000 (US). Two Original App and Ported App finalists (four total) will each receive $500 (US). All six winners will also receive prominent editorial placement in the Ning Apps directory.

Please visit the Ning Developer Network for more information. Good luck!

Posted by Kyle Ford, Director of Partner Design & Development, Ning

Come Join Us at the Ning Appathon!

2009-10-21T15:40:00.000-07:00

To continue the momentum from our recent Ning Apps launch -- our Apps program based on OpenSocial -- we're excited to announce that we'll be holding a special developer event called the Ning Appathon at our offices in Palo Alto, CA on Thursday, November 5th from 6pm-10pm.

The event will include:

An overview of Ning Apps and our OpenSocial implementation
Presentations from existing Ning Apps developers
A chance to meet members of the Ning Engineering and Developer Advocacy teams
Free pizza and beer :)

Most importantly, we'll be announcing the start of a week-long app development competition which will include awards for new applications in addition to ported applications. Prizes and details will be revealed at the event.

All attendees will receive a complimentary Ning hoodie, so be sure to tell us your shirt size when RSVPing. You can attend solo or bring one colleague, we only ask that you RSVP by 9pm PST on Thursday, October 29th through our website, http://developer.ning.com/appathon. All attendees must be at least 21 years of age.

Thanks!

Posted by Ernie Hsiung, Lead Developer Evangelist, Ning

Write a Gadget, Win $5000!

2009-09-23T15:55:00.000-07:00

Mark Halvorson from Atlassian Software here! You may have read my blog post a while back about Why Enterprise Software Provider Atlassian chose OpenSocial Atlassian. We've been working hard over the past year adding an OpenSocial container based on Shindig into JIRA 4. I'm writing today because we've got some cool news for all you gadget developers out there.

But before I mention that, I wanted to give you a heads up about Atlassian. We build affordable, lightweight software that helps enterprises collaborate better. Our products include Confluence, recognized as the most widely-used enterprise wiki, and JIRA, one of the world's most popular issue trackers for IT project management. We also make a bunch of developer tools to help you write great code. Check us out.

We're excited to announce Atlassian Codegeist IV, our fourth annual plugin competition. We're giving away over $50,000 in prizes for the coolest, most useful, most elegant plugin or integration for any of Atlassian's products. There are six prizes, each worth $5,000 in cash, and thousands
more in software, conference tickets, and even a new MacBook!

But the interesting thing for the OpenSocial community is that because JIRA 4 is now an OpenSocial Container, and gadgets are now a big part of our plugin competition! To jumpstart our gadget development, we're sponsoring a category for best OpenSocial gadget inside JIRA. In JIRA 4, we're focusing on the gadgets part of the spec, with more Social features to come in our next release. OpenSocial is a brand new technology for our community, so the field is wide open.

We've also got a first- and second-place Best Plugin prizes, and three other specific categories for different types of plugins (each still worth $5,000). There's something here for everyone, including opportunities beyond traditional Java development.

This year we will even be announcing the winners live on October 21 at AtlasCamp, our premier developer conference. You need not be present to win, but it sure will be more fun!

You can use the Developer Forums to communicate with your peers, find team-members, ask questions, and publicize your awesome new plugin. The Atlassian Developer Community is strong, and Codegeist is a wonderful chance to collaborate with other developers.

Check out the Codegeist website for more information and get started today.

Thanks, and Happy Coding!
http://www.atlassian.com/

Posted by Mark Halvorson, Atlassian Software

MySpace Full Support of OpenSocial 0.9 REST APIs Now Available

2009-09-22T09:45:00.000-07:00

MySpace is pleased to unleash our full support of OpenSocial 0.9. MySpace's OpenSocial 0.9 implementation was built on an entirely new framework with three main goals in mind for developers; stability, performance and compliance to the OpenSocial 0.9 specification. These three goals will yield more consistent results, fewer errors, and means that your code should be even more portable to other social networks that support OpenSocial.

While we're labeling this as a BETA, we feel our APIs are in a very solid state and are ready for widespread use. The PHP and C# SDKs have been fully updated to use all of the new 0.9 APIs we have available. The other SDKs are currently being updated for your use and we've started to update the community-supported SDKs found at opensocial.org.

Documentation for all the APIs can be found here:

Activities : Provides the event data found in the MySpace Activity Stream.
Albums : Support for fetching, creating and updating photo albums.
AppData : A generic key/value store that your app can use to fetch, update and delete data relevant to your app.
Groups : Provides information on a user's friend categories.
MediaItems : Photo support, including photo uploads.
People : Gives access to a user's profile data, as well as their friends' profile data.
StatusMood : Allows support for updating and fetching a user's status and mood, as well as fetching their friends' status and mood.
Notifications : Create app notifications that are displayed in the recipient's mail center.

Posted by Chad Russell, MySpace Team

Japan's mixi has launched its OpenSocial Container for all users!

2009-09-17T16:39:00.000-07:00

Hello! My name is Yoichiro Tanaka, and I belong to the Platform Team of mixi, Inc. "mixi" is currently the most popular social networking service (SNS) in Japan and has more than 17 million registered users. I am happy to announce that we have released "mixi apps" which is based on OpenSocial to all of our users. As of September 4th, more than 220 apps have already been registered and launched!

Background

mixi was originally launched in February 2004 as one of the first social networking services in Japan. It lets users create profiles, make friends with other users, post diaries, discuss in communities, share pictures and music with friends, etc.

mixi apps is a new service which lets social application providers develop applications that use social graphs formed within mixi, and provide these applications to mixi users. To achieve this, we chose OpenSocial as the best solution.

In order to be ready with a quality set of applications for our public launch, we have been running a beta version of mixi apps for our developers since last December.

Applications

Since our launch of mixi apps, we are finding some applications that are substantially more popular than others. Here's two of the more popular applications.

The first application is "Kanji test" produced by Drecom. It challenges users, who compete against each other, to write down how to read Kanji characters (also known as to "furiganize"). It also shows the ranking of the number of Kanji sets that the user successfully furiganized. In the relatively short period since it has been available to users, it has skyrocketed in popularity and already has over three hundred thousand users!

The next application is "Recollect sketch" produced by REAL. Users are given a theme, and are challenged to draw it entirely from memory! What results is usually a very unique and funny image which users can share and enjoy with friends. This application is visually entertaining and social, and it already has about one hundred thousand users.

The preceding applications are just a sample of the continually growing application directory of mixi apps, which averages several new applications per day!

Supported Features

OpenSocial 0.8.1 core APIs (People, Activities, Persistence, and Invite).
The gadgets "core" and "feature-Specific" APIs (mostly supported).
Partly supports Albums API in OpenSocial 0.9.
A mixi specific "Community API," which allows application access to mixi community (or group) information along with its members.

Upcoming Supported Features

Sending a notification between users using a requestSendMessage function.
Sending a event of app's life-cycle for developers.

mixi Ad Program

In addition to mixi apps, we have also recently announced the "mixi Ad Program". This service is one of the business support programs from mixi for developers. If you decide to join this service, ads will be shown within your application, and you will make profits through revenue sharing based on your application's page view. This service has already started from September 3rd, 2009.

The features of "mixi Ad Program" are the following:

Registry and usage fee are free!
Both corporate and individual developers can join this program.
Ordering and confirming your reports is easy through a single management page.
Assured profit of a minimum of 0.01 yen per page view.

More information on this service can be found at:

http://developer.mixi.co.jp/appli/mixi_adprogram/adprogram_info (Note: this site is in Japanese)

We believe this production release of "mixi apps" and overall support of the OpenSocial standards will enable us to easily continue innovating on compelling future social services for our users. In addition, we hope that our business support programs will greatly contribute to developing the market of mixi apps.

Posted by Yoichiro Tanaka, mixi Platform Team.

Business of Social Applications

2009-09-15T09:03:00.000-07:00

In just over two years, social applications have greatly enhanced the user experience on social networks. The number of app installs among social networks has climbed into the billions, creating an industry with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. In this series of blog posts we are going to cover a wide range of topics such as business models, characteristics of successful apps, best practices, and metrics/stats.

Historic Overview

The industry started out with the introduction of the Facebook Application Platform but has since expanded to many other social networks all over the world thanks to the OpenSocial standard. Social networks that benefited from adoption of OpenSocial include MySpace, orkut, hi5, Yahoo, and more than 20 other social networks. You can visit the OpenSocial

wiki for technical details, tutorials and samples, and check out the Containers page for a comprehensive listing of all the OpenSocial networks along with traffic and demographics data.

In a short period of time, social applications have gone through two distinct phases in terms of feature richness and monetization methods. The first phase was dominated by apps providing simple social interactions such as self-expression or giving gifts. The second phase exhibits increasingly sophisticated characteristics in apps such as game design patterns (levels, points, rankings, etc.) and user generated content.

Business Models Overview

The business models of social apps have closely followed the development of social apps. In the first phase, the most revenue was generated from traditional display ads, supplemented by affiliate/referral offers and app installs. This worked well for simple interactive apps with relatively low engagement because users quickly moved on to next thing, be it an ad, a link or another app install. In this phase, less engagement by users in apps kept page view inventory in balance with available ads, resulting in high eCPM and profits for developers.

As apps matured in sophistication and richness, users became much more engaged with apps, less inclined to click on ads, links, or another app installs. Higher engagement also generated much higher demand for page view inventory, outweighing the supply from ad networks and therefore reducing eCPM rates. Out of necessity, app developers learned to take advantage of high user engagement by selling virtual goods, and in doing so, creating virtual economy business models that have provided the second boost to the ecosystems of social apps.

Stay tuned as we explore the business of social apps in upcoming posts on the OpenSocial blog.

Posted by Shawn Shen, Google Developer Relations

Ning Apps Launch Across 1.5 Million Ning Networks

2009-09-10T08:33:00.000-07:00

Today we released Ning Apps, or third-party applications based on OpenSocial 0.8, that serve as new, rich features for our 1.5 million+ Ning Networks and 33 million users.

Thanks to OpenSocial and more than 90 Ning App developers, our Ning Network Creators now have an even greater choice over the features and applications they can add to Ning Networks to make them exactly right for a given topic, interest or passion.

If you don’t know about Ning, we’re the social platform for the world’s interests and passions online. Through the power of Ning Networks, we bring the context of topics, interests and passions to social networking. We’ve been at work on Ning Apps in a private beta for a few months now and our Network Creators love Ning Apps for three key reasons.

First, with a single click, a Ning Network Creator can now add Ning Apps to expand the functionality of their Ning Network and increase engagement by their members. Most social platforms rely exclusively on members adding applications to their profile pages, but when a Network Creator adds a Ning App, that Ning App is available to all of the members of that Ning Network in a flash. This means that with one action, a Network Creator can make their Ning App available to hundreds, thousands or even millions of people instantaneously. This is a different – and we think better – approach to application distribution.

Second, with the breadth of Ning Apps, the options on Ning Networks are infinite for Network Creators. Here are some examples of how Ning Networks can use Ning Apps to engage their unique audience in a relevant and effective way.

For Artist, Musician or Entertainment Ning Networks

Sellit online store to sell merchandise
Ticketmaster or LiveNation to sell event tickets
Qik to stream mobile video or Ustream.tv to live video chat from a live event

For Activist and Non-Profit Ning Networks

Social Giving by Pinc to support fundraising efforts
Marketplace Classifieds to allow people to post and search local ads for more volunteers and resources
BlogTalkRadio to host live radio shows
PollDaddy to rapidly gauge members level of involvement
Huddle to share workspaces and collateral
Tungle.me to schedule meetings and mobilize members
WordPress to display blog posts

For Sports Fan or Extreme Athlete Ning Networks

NewsShare to share highlights and stories
Emote to share real time reactions to games and players

You can see the Full Ning Apps Directory at about.ning.com/ningapps.

Third, Ning Apps are completely integrated into Ning Networks by design. Ning Apps support gadgets.skins, allowing them to automatically inherit the visual style of the Ning Network to which they're added. Additionally, each Ning App by default is designed to write to a member's Latest Activity feed, send messages on behalf of the member (via requestSendMessage) and drive distribution using a Ning Network’s default viral sharing options.

If you're a developer interested in more info, please check out our Ning Developer Network. If you're a Ning Network Creator, please visit the full Ning Apps Directory on your Ning Network to start adding Ning Apps today.

Posted by Jay Parikh, Senior Vice President of Product Engineering at Ning

Check out Cyworld's developer sandbox

2009-09-02T08:31:00.000-07:00

Annyonghaseyo! This is Kyle Kim from Cyworld with some exciting news!

We have recently launched Dev.Square a sandbox environment for Cyworld developers. In celebration of the launch, we had a big announcement conference in Seoul with over 750 people attending (see the photos here). I'd like to thank everyone who attended the conference as well as those who contacted us after reading our previous post.

For developers in Korea who are interested in writing applications for Cyworld, we are hosting a workshop on September 4, 2009. Speakers from our partner companies (including Mickey Kim and Chris Schalk from Google) will host sessions on OpenSocial APIs, social gaming, and trends within the social apps industry. For more details on the workshop, please visit the Dev.Square website.

The DevSquare website is currently available in Korean and English; Language settings can be changed from the drop-down menu at the bottom of the page. In order to register as a developer, you should first register as a Nate/Cyworld member. We apologize for the cumbersome process, but do not miss this opportunity to access our 24 million Cyworld users / 27 million NateOn (IM) users.

For English comments / questions, please contact Dyne (dynelee@skcomms.co.kr), and for Korean comments / questions, contact devsquare@nate.com.

We have also created an official Twitter page. Please follow us for frequent updates.

Posted by Kyle Kim, Cyworld Team

iGoogle joins the social web

2009-08-13T14:20:00.000-07:00

Those of you who were around for the early days of OpenSocial might remember that one of the very first test implementations ran on iGoogle. Since that early version more than a year and a half ago, the iGoogle team has worked hard to get the experience right. Today we're pleased to announce that, starting this week, iGoogle supports OpenSocial gadgets in both the US and Australia.

The 19 social gadgets that launched today offer iGoogle users new ways to make their homepage more useful and fun. Gaming fanatics can compete with others in Who has the biggest brain? or challenge their fellow Chess or Scrabble enthusiasts to a quick match. News enthusiasts can add media-sharing gadgets from NPR, The Huffington Post, and YouTube.

Developers using the OpenSocial API can now reach the tens of millions of iGoogle users in the US and Australia, and we plan to roll it out to more users soon. If you're interested in writing you own social gadgets for iGoogle, check out the full announcement on the iGoogle developer blog.

Posted by Dan Holevoet, Google Developer Programs

XING Launches OpenSocial-based Partner Ecosystem

2009-08-12T12:56:00.000-07:00

Hello, my name is Matthias Häsel, and I am a Senior Product Manager at XING, the leading European online business network. Over 8 million members use XING in 16 languages to do business, find jobs, and further their careers. XING helps members find contacts and stay in touch with them with customized networking solutions and services.

It gives me great pleasure to announce the XING Partner Ecosystem to the OpenSocial community. XING’s members will benefit from a wide variety of partner applications on the XING platform, all made possible via OpenSocial.

XING’s partners are able to create applications using OpenSocial v0.8 and then easily integrate those applications into the XING professional network. The applications are firmly integrated into the core functionality of XING, using OpenSocial's People, Activities, and Notification services. The applications are thus able to leverage XING’s “business graph” of connections between professionals to make the applications engaging and rewarding for XING’s users.

What’s most exciting about the XING Partner Ecosystem is that it is a win-win-win for everyone involved:

XING’s members win because they benefit from the useful applications we introduce for various specific user interests.
XING’s partners win because their applications are made available to all of the users on the XING platform.
XING wins because our service becomes more valuable to our members and partners.

We have 16 launch applications from 13 partners from 7 different countries, specifically Austria (ZCOPE), Canada (Tungle), Finland (Dopplr), Switzerland (Doodle), the UK (Huddle), the USA (SlideShare) and Germany (WELT online, Süddeutsche Karrierecamp, Wallstreet:online, DW-World, travelload, Mindmeister and Spreed, as well as our own applications).

The XING launch apps represent our focus on both locally relevant and globally valuable applications. We host many applications that function in multiple languages, as well as several apps that are specific to the German-speaking markets.

This is just the beginning. We will be adding more and more apps in the future.

Got an app that you think would be suitable for XING? Here are our guiding principles for getting new apps onto the XING platform.

Open — we are open to launching anyone’s application if we believe it will provide user value. In the end, the XING users will decide which apps they prefer. So, we are OPEN for apps. Come one, come all, with your great applications!
Professional — not just any application, but apps that are suitable for a professional network and that provide value to the business community in the markets we serve.
Rewarding — apps that provide a return on time investment to our users.

Do you think your app idea meets our criteria? Visit our OpenSocial Partner Community to learn more.

But don’t just read about the apps. I encourage you to check them out - and give us your feedback on them! UserVoice has proved to be just the right tool for that. Simply click on the big button labeled “feedback” on the right side to give us your ideas and suggestions and to vote on them along with other XING members.

To learn more about the XING Partner Ecosystem, please visit: https://www.xing.com/opensocial.

Posted by Matthias Häsel, XING Team

Sonico has launched its OpenSocial Container!

2009-07-30T15:39:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to announce that Sonico, one of Latin America's leading social networks, has successfully rolled out its OpenSocial container to over +39 million users! A fantastic group of launch partners, including Buddypoke and GameDesire, worked with us for this initial release! Sonico is one of the leading social networks in Latin America, and is positioned as the second largest social network in Brazil. It is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Sonico's OpenSocial (v 0.8) platform includes the following:

Full support for the core Opensocial APIs:

AppData
People/Person
Activities

Gadget rendering of home, profile, preview and canvas views

Dimensions for views are the same as used by Orkut

Viral features:

requestCreateActivity
requestShareApp
requestSendMessage

RESTful APIs

RESTful and RPC protocols
2-legged Oauth

Test & Publish your apps!

Our goal is to extend our application offering with useful and entertaining applications which bring value to our community and improve their experience!

We’re happy to invite the OpenSocial developer community to our sandbox and encourage the submission of engaging apps! It is a great opportunity to tap into a market that is eager for social applications.

Request sandbox access and read about our OpenSocial implementation:

http://sandbox.sonico.com

To learn about Sonico's RESTful API visit:

http://api.sonico.com

To learn more about Sonico's demographics and growth:

http://www.slideshare.net/sonico/sonico-corporate-en

Background

Sonico is a social communication platform launched in July 2007 that merges social utility and entertainment to organize people’s life online. Developed with a strong emphasis in user legitimacy, privacy and personalization, it has been widely adopted across Latin America. Sonico is positioned as the second largest social network in Brazil, and is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Located in Buenos Aires and with a team over 80 people, Sonico was elected by BusinessWeek as the 5th tech startup with the highest global growth potential. Sonico closed its first round of capitalization of USD 4.3 million in May 2008.

For more information: http://corporate.sonico.com/

Posted by Alvaro Teijeiro
Partner & CIO, Sonico.com

Social apps for your virtual self

2009-07-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

Avatars United is pleased to announce the launch of the Avatars United Developer Platform and its OpenSocial container! The Developer Platform was initially made available to selected developers two months ago, but is now open to everyone.

Background
Avatars United is a social network for virtual world avatars launched in early 2008. The site was built in recognition of the fact that strong bonds and close friendships exist within virtual spaces. Users can register multiple avatars and connect with their virtual friends or gather in groups to discuss and plan in-game events. Avatars United also offers a virtual currency, which can be used to customize avatar and group profiles, and purchase virtual items. Currently, 80 of the most popular online games and virtual worlds are supported, including World of Warcraft, EVE Online and Second Life.

The Avatars United Developer Platform is part of Avatars United’s vision to allow each user to select and install applications that suit his or her particular character development targets in his or her particular virtual world setting. The platform supports applications for both avatars and groups. This in combination with game-specific APIs allows for some truly innovative social applications that could help enhance the gaming experience in the same way as game add-ons already have proven to do. Check out WoW Armory or the newly launched EVE Achievements for some examples.

Features
Avatars United's OpenSocial container includes the following:

Full support for core OpenSocial 0.8.1 JavaScript APIs
OpenSocial 0.8.1 JSON-RPC Protocol
Gadget views: profile, canvas, home, preview, group profile and group canvas
Preview support for OpenSocial 0.9 Albums API
OpenSocial extensions for Groups and Worlds, allowing access to information about groups, group members and the worlds (i.e. games) and realms (i.e. game servers) supported on Avatars United

The following features are currently not supported:

opensocial.requestShareApp
OpenSocial RESTful protocol
Proxied requests using 3-legged OAuth (i.e. gadgets.io.AuthorizationType.OAUTH)
3-legged OAuth for the OpenSocial RPC protocol

To learn more about the Avatars United Developer Platform please visit the developer website.

Development Contest
As part of our launch, we are organizing an EVE Online application development contest in cooperation with CCP Games. Develop an application for EVE Online and have the chance to win cool prizes, including cash, cloud services credits, computer gear and special EVE Online prizes! Check out the contest page for more information.

Posted by Jacob Gyllenstierna, Product Manager, Avatars United Developer Platform

Japan's mixi adds mobile support with its OpenSocial RESTful API

2009-07-23T09:04:00.000-07:00

Hello, my name is Hidetaka Yamashita, and I am in charge of mixi's OpenSocial Mobile project. I am very happy to announce that mixi has recently added support for mobile phones to our OpenSocial platform. mixi.jp is currently the most popular Japanese social networking service (SNS) and has more than 17 million registered users. You may have heard about our recently launched OpenSocial developer sandbox in April. With this announcement, we are introducing our "mixi apps for mobile" platform which is based on OpenSocial's RESTful API using 2-legged OAuth.

Background

In Japan most people use 3G mobile phones that connect to the Internet at max 7.2Mbps. Currently, more people access the web through mobile phones than through PCs. In mixi's case, access from PCs is approximately 30% compared to mobile phone access, which is 70%. Therefore, it is crucial for mixi to offer mobile phone support for OpenSocial applications.

How mixi's mobile platform works

mixi's mobile development platform is targeted for non-native mobile development, where third party developers build mobile social apps on their own application servers. However, when accessing the application from a mobile phone, users still point their phones to the main mixi site as it serves mainly as a proxy to the third party site. As the response returns from the third party site, the mixi Application Proxy processes the response (which is purely content) and merges it into a complete XHTML response (by adding a header and footer). It is then passed back to the requesting mobile phone. Since the core application itself resides on a third party site, developers build their apps using the RESTful API with 2-legged OAuth to securely access social data from mixi.

With mixi's RESTful API with 2-legged OAuth, OpenSocial applications can run anytime, anywhere!

Supported Features

API (requires authentication using 2-legged OAuth). You can access all the core OpenSocial APIs, as well as photos and communities on mixi.

Timeline (for mobile)

Closed beta version - Ongoing now
Consumer launch - September 2009
Official ads program - September 2009
Virtual currency and Payment API - October 2009

To learn more about mixi's new OpenSocial mobile platform please visit: http://developer.mixi.co.jp/. (Note: this site is in Japanese.)

Posted by Hidetaka Yamashita, mixi, Inc.

Apache Shindig 1.0-incubating released

2009-07-02T10:58:00.000-07:00

Apache Shindig aims to make it simple to create your own OpenSocial container by providing an open source implementation (in both Java and PHP) of the OpenSocial APIs. The Shindig team recently made creating and maintaining an OpenSocial container even easier, by publishing a release that supports OpenSocial v0.8.1.

Now, instead of checking out a specific revision or trying to keep up with the ever-changing trunk, OpenSocial container developers can use stable releases in their own websites. As issues come up, the Shindig community will fix them and roll them into the stable release, so developers will just need to grab the new version.

The Apache Shindig 1.0-incubating release is available on the downloads page of the Shindig website. If you've been running an older revision or branch, now's the time to update to known-good state. Of course, the Shindig folks have been busy, so if you're interested in new features, like templates and the streamlined JavaScript API, you can get all the OpenSocial v0.9 features by checking out the source -- and a stable release supporting OpenSocial v0.9 is already in the works!

Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, on behalf of the Apache Shindig Team

A new addition to the OpenSocial family - the ActionScript3 client library!

2009-06-29T09:26:00.000-07:00

The current generation of social applications has become increasingly interesting and attractive, with many apps sporting fancy animation effects and complex user interactions. One exciting result of this trend is the growing number of ActionScript developers in the community.

To support the development of OpenSocial apps using ActionScript, we are happy to introduce a new client library which exposes almost all of the OpenSocial v0.8 JavaScript APIs in native ActionScript 3 for Flash and Flex gadget developers. The library provides an event-driven development model that is prevalent in the ActionScript community, a FlexUnit-based testing framework, and samples for both Flash and Flex environments. We hope the library will ease the learning curve for ActionScript developers and shorten the development cycle. To check out the code, point your browsers to the Source tab linked from the ActionScript Client Library project page.

This library is completely open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, and contributions are not only welcomed, but encouraged. In addition to a wiki page explaining the patch submission process, this project hosts an issue tracker which will be populated with known issues and requested enhancements. This tracker is the best place to start if you're interested in contributing to the project. Please use the tracker to report any new bugs or incompatibilities you find, or to request new features. You can also 'star' feature requests reported by other developers if they are significant to your own development. This will help us prioritize which bugs or features to work on next. Also, you are welcome to join the client library discussion forum and post your questions and feedback. We look forward to seeing you there!

Posted by Jacky Wang, OpenSocial Team

Why Enterprise Software Provider Atlassian Chose OpenSocial

2009-06-23T14:29:00.000-07:00

Hi, I'm Mark Halvorson the "Chief Imagineer" at Atlassian Software. Whenever I tell people my title it is usually received in one of two ways - a chuckle and a blank stare, or for those in the know some comment about Walt Disney. No, I don't make rides for an amusement park, but I do get to imagine inventive ways to combine thorny, enterprise challenges with some of the exciting things happening on the consumer web. That is why I'm particularly excited to blog in this forum about how Atlassian is bringing OpenSocial to the Enterprise.

Enterprise, meet OpenSocial

Much like "Imagineer" makes you think Walt Disney when you hear OpenSocial, you are likely thinking: Orkut, MySpace, and other Internet social networks. When we heard OpenSocial we thought: now there's some cool technology we can use to bring our portfolio closer together, and closer to lots of great stuff on the Internet.

Atlassian is a seven-year young software company, hailing from Australia, and building collaboration and productivity tools for developers and teams. Many of you may of come across two of our better known products: JIRA, an issue tracker, and Confluence, an enterprise wiki. The rest of the portfolio includes a series of developer tools: FishEye, for exploring source code on the web; Crucible, for peer code review; Bamboo, a continuous integration server; and Clover, for test coverage analysis. We also offer Studio, which combines several of these products into a hosted integrated development suite.

Development is a social activity

Development is social. Developers work in teams, often with other non-developers like product managers and technical writers. Those teams work together on a variety of shared objects: specifications, tasks, documentation, source code, builds and projects. Each of those shared objects generate lots of activity: comments, subtasks, notifications of changes and edits, build failures, code commits. These teams use lots of different tools and systems: wikis, bug trackers, build automation systems, source code repositories. That's a huge internal social network. People working with people, people working with systems, and systems working with systems - a river of activity that needs to funnel to the people who care about it most. Our mission is to help developers collaborate and communicate easier, and in the process help them write higher quality code faster.

Okay, so why OpenSocial?

With eight products that support various parts of the development process, each with their own dashboard, and each spitting off data and activity that the others could benefit from, OpenSocial gave us an inventive, proven integration pattern: gadgets . We've embraced OpenSocial gadgets as a method of integration between our own products and between other enterprise software, and we're using OpenSocial gadgets as a mechanism to inject functionality and information from our products into other OpenSocial-compliant containers on the Internet, like Gmail or iGoogle.

JIRA 4.0 will be the first OpenSocial container in our portfolio to ship. JIRA has implemented OpenSocial through Shindig as a series of Atlassian plugins, which we call the Atlassian Gadgets plugins. JIRA produces Gadgets that can be displayed by other OpenSocial-compliant containers, including iGoogle and Gmail, and authentication between Gadget producers and consumers is handled through OAuth. We're excited about the possibilities. JIRA dashboards can now quickly assemble build status from Bamboo, project updates from Confluence, assigned code reviews from Crucible, all in the context of the issues and tasks assigned to a developer in the context of a JIRA project. Are you a team lead, and spend most of your time in Gmail? No problem, take all of that same information and park it there, so it's right alongside your inbox.

We've launched a little site that talks more about what we're doing at http://www.atlassian.com/opensocial. You can also follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/atlassian. I hope to do more blogging here about things we learn and cool stuff we're experimenting with. In the meantime, here's short video of how a dev manager, who may live in Gmail, can file issues and track the state of projects and builds using Atlassian Gadgets in Gmail.

Posted by Mark Halvorson, Chief Imagineer, Atlassian Software Team

Check out these videos and slides from Google I/O

2009-06-10T12:22:00.000-07:00

If you weren't able to make it to Google I/O, or if you're looking for a refresher on one of the sessions you saw, the Google I/O site now has videos of all the social sessions so everyone can watch and learn. From design principles to saving on bandwidth and hosting costs, you're sure to learn something new about how to improve your OpenSocial app. You can find a summary of all the social sessions in this post on the Google Code blog, but here's the list:

Like all things with OpenSocial, our presence at Google I/O was a community effort. We had lots of guest speakers in sessions and many developers volunteered for interviews, so thanks again to everyone who helped make the social track at Google I/O a success.

Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, OpenSocial Team

Hi5 launches hi5 Coins payment platform using OpenSocial Virtual Currency API

2009-06-02T08:57:00.000-07:00

Ever since launching our OpenSocial platform in March 2008, developers have been eager for a unified payment platform for collecting micro-transactions on hi5. Over the past year, we have moved ahead to make such a virtual currency platform available to developers while ensuring a positive user experience for our members. Over the last few weeks, hi5 has been launching our first third-party games integrated via OpenSocial-compliant APIs to our virtual currency platform – providing a standard payment method for developers to monetize their applications through our audience of over 60 million active users around the world.

The first step in this progression was the launch of our virtual currency back in December 2008, which allowed users to buy hi5 Coins and use them to purchase virtual goods on the site. This platform was initially accessible only for hi5 premium features like Gifts. We rapidly expanded the ways that users could get real currency into the system – going beyond credit/debit cards to include payment methods, such as mobile SMS, offers and alternate cards, like Ultimate Game cards, that are popular in different parts of the world.

The next step was to make our payments interface OpenSocial compliant. In order to make our virtual currency more universal across hi5 and non-hi5 applications, our OpenSocial platform team collaborated with other containers to propose an OpenSocial Virtual Currency API as an extension to the OpenSocial specification. Our virtual currency interface was expedited due to the work started by other OpenSocial containers like Xiaonei.com, 51.com, and Netlog.com. With real use cases from Asia, Europe and Latin America, the containers quickly converged on the API specifications.

The hi5 OpenSocial Virtual Currency interface is already live in public beta with several third-party developers like RockYou (RockYou Pets), Playdom (Poker Palace) and Small Worlds, enabling them to collect direct user payments within their games. We have a number of additional partnerships that will launch soon. OpenSocial developers can now leverage a standard virtual currency spec across containers – allowing them to monetize through micro-transactions without worrying about the details of payment processing, currency conversions, localized payment methods or other logistical challenges. Our users benefit, as well, with more outlets for spending their hi5 Coins and a simplified and familiar process for making payments on the hi5 site. We look forward to continuing to work with the OpenSocial community to innovate on the virtual currency standard and to make micro-transactions between users and developers a viable and growing revenue stream.

Posted by Anil Dharni, VP of Products at hi5 and member of the OpenSocial Foundation Board of Directors

Cyworld plans to adopt OpenSocial

2009-05-28T10:57:00.000-07:00

Annyonghaseyo!

My name is Kyle Kim and I work on the Open Cyworld project at SK Communications in Korea. We are very excited to announce that we plan to adopt OpenSocial for Cyworld, which is the biggest social networking service in Korea with more than 23 million members registered under their real names!

Also known as the first ever SNS with an established business model of selling virtual items with own virtual currency, Dotori (acorns), we are looking for quality applications that will enhance our users’ experience on Cyworld.

We plan to launch a closed beta developer sandbox in July and an open beta service by the end of September (Dotori payment API will be launched later this year). There will also be a conference in July, introducing Open Cyworld project to media, industry as well as developers.

We believe there will be plenty of opportunities for you as a developer:

The biggest real-name based network in the world
Payment API with proven virtual currency, Dotori
Viral distribution system integrated with NateOn, the leading instant messenger in Korea with 27 million registered members

We are at Google I/O this week, and would be happy to meet developers interested in Cyworld!

About SK Communications

SK Communications is an affiliate of SK Group, the 3rd largest corporation in Korea, and a direct subsidiary of SK Telecom, the dominant telecommunications provider in Korea with over 50% of market share.

A leading online service provider, SK Communications offers wide range of services including Cyworld (SNS), NateOn (IM), Nate (Portal), etc.

About Cyworld

Cyworld is the biggest real-name based social networking service in the world. With more than 23 million registered members, Cyworld users consist of 48% of total Korean population and 66% of all internet users in Korea. Main business model is digital item sales, which includes decorations for “Minihompies” and music.

Cyworld earns more than 7 billion KRW per month in revenue from digital item sales; Average revenue per user is about 2,700 KRW per month.

Cyworld Fact Sheet (as of December 2008)

23 million registered members
Among them, 13.6 million members log in on the site more than once per month
Average number of 1-chon (friends) per member, 47.8
All Cyworld members are connected to each other by 4.5 degrees of separation
6.6 billion photographs uploaded
19.6 billion postings
12 million postings posted everyday
8 million replies posted everyday
2,320 stars with Cyworld Minihompies
1.7 million members visiting their Minihompies everyday

If you’re interested in writing apps for Cyworld, please contact Dyne, who works for Corporate Development Team (dynelee@skcomms.co.kr)

[Update: Changed link to point to Cyworld Korea, since that's where OpenSocial will be launched.]

Posted by Kyle Kim, Cyworld Team

The OpenSocial App Directory: All our apps in one place

2009-05-27T09:11:00.000-07:00

Today, social app developers must submit their applications on each of the dozens of OpenSocial containers in order to leverage the full potential of OpenSocial's wide distribution. Likewise, it's difficult for new containers to tap into OpenSocial's large developer base and find great apps for their sites. As a result, it's hard to tell just how many apps are out there and who's using them.

The OpenSocial App Directory is a community-wide effort to create a centralized location for developers and containers to submit, review, and share OpenSocial applications. In the initial release, we've included applications that are live on several popular sites that support OpenSocial, like MySpace, orkut, and hi5. Going forward, we plan to include approved apps from more containers, as well as allow developers to submit their own apps.

Please visit the Directory Info page to learn more about how to be included in the directory.

Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, OpenSocial Team

What's on your mind? Ask the experts at Google I/O

2009-05-26T14:25:00.000-07:00

There will be a number of sessions on OpenSocial at Google I/O this week and we've assembled several panels of industry leaders, from top app developers to the biggest containers, and even some folks from the enterprise world. It will be a great chance to learn from people that have lots of experience with OpenSocial -- even if you can't make it to the event yourself.

Using Google Moderator, you can post your own question or vote on other questions that you'd like to hear answered. We'll address the top questions at Google I/O and post videos of the sessions online so everyone can benefit from the answers.

Wonder how Playfish, RockYou!, Zynga and others have attracted millions of users to their apps? Ask questions for the Fireside Chat with App Developers here!
Thinking of starting your own OpenSocial container, but not sure where to start? Ask questions for the Fireside Chat with Containers here!
Wondering how you can take this technology into the enterpise? Ask questions for the "OpenSocial in the Enterprise" session here!

You can find Q&A pages for all the sessions at I/O, so let us know what's on your mind and we'll address your questions at the event.

Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, OpenSocial Team

OpenSocial from an Enterprise perspective

2009-05-22T16:11:00.000-07:00

This post is part of the Who's @ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that give a closer look at developers who'll be speaking or demoing at Google I/O.

As a Platform Evangelist at salesforce.com I have the enviable job of evaluating various technologies and how they relate to the Force.com platform. Part of my recent exploration has been around the possibility of leveraging social networking for the enterprise, which has led me to explore many social networking technologies, including OpenSocial.

Social and professional networking revolve around people. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is also all about people, but with a bit of formality around the relationships between the people. In my CRM system, I have friends and colleagues, but I also have relationships with customers and potential customers (contacts and leads in the CRM parlance) that may be friends, professional acquaintances, or complete strangers.

Now, understanding that I have these formal and informal relationships, how do I combine the two in a way that respects all the aspects or characteristics of these relationships? That's a big question.

The Force.com platform allows you to address this question by leveraging social networks at the business logic level. That means your integration with a social network is not limited to users viewing apps on a page. Using OpenSocial's REST APIs, you can create solutions that work their magic behind the scenes, allowing true innovation in developing enterprise applications that leverage social and professional networks.

Salesforce.com is one of several companies building technology to help bring social elements to the enterprise. Next week at Google I/O several of us will be participating in an OpenSocial in the Enterprise panel where we (and you!) can help move this field forward. Come challenge us with your own thought-provoking questions about mixing social and enterprise. You can even start posting your questions now on this Q&A page and we'll address them next week.

Posted by Dave Carroll, Platform Evangelist - Salesforce.com

How OpenSocial v0.9 streamlines your app

2009-05-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

One of the major updates to OpenSocial in the latest version is a new programming model that allows you to send social data directly from the container to your application's server, where you can use the data to render any content you want to show the user. This model lets you use your existing presentation layer (faster coding!) and reduces the number of requests needed to pass social data between clients, containers, and your app server (faster apps!). Here's a closer look...

Many apps want to combine the social data from the container with the application data that lives on their server. In previous iterations of OpenSocial, many apps did something like the following:

Client requests profile and friend info from the container (via DataRequests)
Container responds with the social data
Client requests application data from a remote server (via makeRequest)
Container proxies request to remote server
Remote server responds to container with application data
Client combines the social and application data and presents it to the user (via JavaScript)

With v0.9's streamlined approach, the container can send social data to a remote server via "data pipelining" and you can combine that social data on your server, using your existing presentation layer, with a technique called "proxied content." The new flow looks like this:

Client requests an application view
The container sends social data to the remote server
The remote server combines social and application data, returning HTML and JavaScript
The container sends the content to the client

Much cleaner! These new features are already live on sandbox.orkut.com and will be coming soon to OpenSocial containers everywhere. To learn how to use data pipelining and proxied content in your OpenSocial app, check out this new tutorial.

Happy coding!

Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, OpenSocial Team

Register Now! San Francisco DevJam - Tuesday, May 26th

2009-05-19T09:20:00.000-07:00

Greetings Developers!

The MySpace Open Platform would like to invite you to the MySpace San Francisco DevJam.

This DevJam covers everything you’ll need to know about how to build great apps using MySpace Open Platform. It will begin with the State of the Platform, and tell you all about what’s happening with the container and things to come. It’ll cover everything from porting apps to MySpace, leveraging messaging channels, OpenSocial 0.9, OSML, using OpenSocial outside the container, and everything in between. You won’t want to miss this DevJam event!

If you can’t attend in person, don’t worry! We plan to livestream the event, stay tuned on that front for more details…

Guest Speakers include:

Jason Oberfest, General Manager of the MySpace Open Platform and SVP of Business Development
Gerardo Capiel, VP of Product for the MySpace Open Platform
Dan Yue, Co-Founder of Playdom
Sebastien de Halleux, Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of Playfish
Max Newbould, Product Lead for MySpace Open Platform’s OpenSocial container
Max Engel, Product Lead for MySpaceID

And many more!

Space is limited, so click below to see the full agenda and to register now!

http://myspacesfdevjam.eventbrite.com/

Hope to see you there!!

Posted by MySpace Open Platform Team

Sonico.com announces the launch of its OpenSocial Container

2009-05-15T15:26:00.000-07:00

Hola! My name is Alvaro Teijeiro and I am Sonico’s development manager.

I’m happy to announce that Sonico has recently launched its OpenSocial developer sandbox! Sonico.com is one of the leading social networks in Latin America with more than 35 million registered users. Positioned as the second largest social network in Brazil, Sonico is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese. We’re currently looking for select launch partners that can work with us to provide valuable engaging apps for our upcoming June production launch.

To request access to the developer sandbox, visit http://sandbox.sonico.com.

Background
Sonico is a social communication platform launched in July 2007 that merges social utility and entertainment to communicate and keep in touch with friends, family and co-workers. Sonico has been developed with a strong emphasis in user legitimacy, privacy and personalization, and is being widely adopted across Latin America.

In addition to popular features such as photo and video sharing, we’ve recently launched a virtual currency system that can be used to purchase a wide variety of goods and services, such as virtual gifts, greeting cards and profile skins. We’re very excited to allow app developers to tap into this new economy and will be working towards it during the next couple of months!

Detailed specs on Sonico’s features, growth and OpenSocial implementation can be found in the following presentation:

Sonico OpenSocial Launch

View more presentations from Sonico Presentations.

Implementation Overview: OpenSocial v0.8.1
Sonico's OpenSocial platform includes the following:

Full support for the core Opensocial APIs:

AppData
People/Person
Activities

Gadget rendering of home, profile, preview and canvas views

Dimensions for views are the same as used by Orkut

Viral features:

requestCreateActivity
requestShareApp
requestSendMessage

RESTful APIs

RESTful and RPC protocols

Upcoming Supported Features

Access to PhotoAlbum API by July
Access to Virtual Currency API by August

For further implementation details and future updates, please see: http://wiki.opensocial.org/index.php?title=Sonico

Timeline
Developer Sandbox – Available now! (since April)
Consumer Launch - June 2009

We’re really excited to work with app developers to deliver engaging, value added applications to millions of users!

For more information regarding Sonico.com OpenSocial platform, please visit and/or contact us at http://sandbox.sonico.com.

Posted by Alvaro Teijeiro, CIO, Sonico