OpenSocial API Blog

OpenSocial Version 2.0.1 Final open for voting

2011-11-16T11:26:00.001-08:00

Version 2.0.1 of the OpenSocial specification has been released for voting. One of the major updates to the specification is finalized support for the OAuth 2.0 specification.

For more information on the changes to the specification and related components, please see the voting thread and file diffs here.

Jonathan LeBlanc (@jcleblanc)
Jonathan LeBlanc is a principal developer evangelist with X.commerce. Jonathan has been a member of the OpenSocial community for over three years and is the author of O'Reilly's "Programming Social Applications".

Join The W3C Social Business Jam

2011-10-19T08:46:00.000-07:00

OpenSocial made significant strides over the past year with the introduction of new capabilities, and broadening its support and alignment with other standards like Activity Streams (http://activitystrea.ms/) and OAuth 2.0 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2-22). One of the fundamental tenants of the community is to engage across the standards ecosystem to leverage adjacent standards and technologies when and where possible.

One way to continue the momentum of OpenSocial is to make a clear connection between the specification, the standards it includes and the needs of businesses. Social technologies are changing the businesses that have embraced and applied them but not not only for media. Businesses are using social technologies to better connect with partners, suppliers and employees -- as well as with customers.

But how are the ideas, technologies and standards in the social space holding up as business-use cases are applied ?

The W3C Social Business Jam is a global, online conversation with business leaders, subject matter experts and like-minded individuals about the current state of social business, the future role that social technologies can play in improving the bottom line, and how social technology should evolve in order to support business objectives. A primary objective of the Jam is to cooperatively explore key trends and concepts in social business with an eye towards how social standards can facilitate business goals. The Jam should produce a better understanding for participants of how businesses are using social technologies and the challenges they face integrating the technologies into their existing environments.

Mark Weitzel, president of the OpenSocial Foundation, is one of the noted hosts for the Jam. While Mark will be an active participant throughout the Jam, he is hosting a conversation on the Seamless Integration Of Social from 12 pm to 4 pm US eastern time on November 8.

Come share your insights and opinions. Registration is open and free, and takes just a few moments of your time. For more information, go to : http://www.w3.org/2011/socialbusiness-jam/

David Robinson

Bring OpenSocial gadgets to Moodle

2011-10-17T15:14:00.000-07:00

We present here a plugin that allows to bring OpenSocial gadgets into Moodle. OpenSocial gadgets are rendered via Apache Shindig (extension of version 2.0 that supports Spaces).

Moodle is a Learning Management System used in many Educational Institutions (Universities) to manage courses. It is a plugin based PHP application that can be extended by installing additional modules. These modules have to be installed on a Moodle server by a system administrator. The Moodle view usually consists of a main center area and a rather narrow right column with blocks. The center area normally contains main resources, such as, wiki, forum, lesson, quiz, etc. The right block contains some helper plugins, such as, calendar, upcoming events, latest news, recent activity, etc. These are to extend the functionality of the main page.

There are two different OpenSocial plugins for moodle. The first one adds a new module to Moodle. It is very similar to pages in moodle, however in addition, OpenSocial gadgets can be specified. Once it is installed, a teacher can choose a "Widget space" to be added to the course and specify OpenSocial gadgets for it. The teacher can choose whether 1,2,3 column view should be used for gadgets.

The resulting outcome is the iGoogle similar view where students can work with gadgets.

The second plugin adds a new block to Moodle. Teacher can add OpenSocial gadgets to the right
column for already existing in Moodle wiki pages, lessons, forums, etc.

One of the main benefits is that the big pool of OpenSocial gadgets can be used by teachers. Thus, once the OpenSocial plugins are installed in Moodle, a teacher can extend the functionality of Moodle without bothering system administrators with plugins installation. The teacher can add and remove gadgets easily and even can write her own ones. The plugins greatly improve the flexibility in choosing the resources and applications for the course specifics. OpenSocial gadgets can be found in the open widget repositories, such as, Role Widget Store, iGoogle Directory, etc.

In addition to reuse of applications existing in the Cloud and flexibility in choosing applications for the course, contextual gadgets and OpenSocial API are the other additional benefits.

Space extension allows gadgets to adapt to a specific context. For example, wiki gadget saves data for a course and manages access to itself only by people engaged in this course. The same wiki gadget will behave differently being added to another course (different wiki history and different people to access it). Such space extension is already used in production in Graaasp and planned in Apache RAVE project.

OpenSocial API brings the standard way to retrieve and exchange social information between different Moodle installations and other social networks, that improves data portability and interoperability.

Plugins work for new version of Moodle 2.1. It should work for Moodle 2.0, though it was not tested. The installation instructions and source code can be found at github:
OpenSocial Moodle module
OpenSocial Moodle block

This plugin was developed within the ROLE Integrated Project and is already used in 5 courses at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Evgeny Bogdanov

OpenSocial 2.0 Brings Us Closer to the Socialized Enterprise

2011-09-20T14:36:00.000-07:00

Now that the final version of the OpenSocial 2.0 spec has been announced, we at Wrike, as one of the companies leading the charge on social collaboration, are excited about seeing more enterprises lean into this type of integration. In fact, we’ve just developed our own OS 2.0 widget, which will help transform email functionality within Wrike’s collaboration tools. But before we tell you more about that, here’s why OpenSocial has our collaborative juices flowing.

Open season for innovation

It’s a safe bet that the typical iPhone user is used to working with direct access to multiple apps that can help him work and play more effectively. iPhone Marketplace was a bigger source of innovation for users than the phone hardware itself. Many enterprise solutions miss that open ecosystem opportunity today. For example, Outlook has millions of users spending their whole working days in front of it, who would love the same type of easy access to useful apps that would enhance their workflow. Yet, how many of those users installed Outlook plug-ins? OpenSocial 2.0 has the potential to open up innovation for enterprise software, bringing the right apps with the right integrations in a safe package, directly in front of users who want to benefit from them.

Bridging gaps between the apps

The improved safety, compatibility and connectivity that the OpenSocial standard offers, makes it a lot easier to build bridges between useful enterprise apps. Bridges that go beyond simple data integrations into the land of fully integrated user experiences. Taking my own company, Wrike, as just one example, we’re based on the belief that project management tools should be inherently social, and this is a fundamental part of our value proposition to companies around the world. So, it’s easy to see why OpenSocial has us excited about ways we can keep improving our users’ experience and their productivity, by plugging into the networks and tools they are already comfortable using.

Potential to turn email into a structured, real-time platform

A couple of days ago, Wrike’s widget appeared in the OpenSocial 2.0 sandbox with examples of embedded experiences in the activity stream, emailbox and a compact dashboard. I’d like to focus a bit more on the email component of the widget and share why we see great potential in it.

Email software has effectively been on “lock-down” since its inception. When you receive dozens of emails on a daily basis, it gets really challenging to turn that type of inbox chaos into the cohesive big picture of your projects and goals. From the start, a key pillar of Wrike’s product vision has always been to open up that software and bring emails into a centralized system, turning long email discussion threads into neat plans. This is why Wrike created its email integration, which allows users to create, assign, schedule and discuss tasks right from their inboxes.

Today, people use email even more than when Wrike was conceived. So, instead of try to push email out of the office toolkit “nest” (which seems like a hard and unproductive thing to do), we wanted to leverage the good things about it. OpenSocial 2.0 gives us new opportunities to implement our exciting idea – to turn 40-year email functionality into a structured, well-organized, real-time platform that supports sharing, discussions and other actions you need for collaboration. Wrike’s widget brings emails to life and integrates them fully into the project management process. Users don’t even need to change anything in their working habits.

In parallel with developing our widget for OpenSocial 2.0, we’ve been working on Wrike’s new add-on for Outlook. For the end user, the experience will be very similar to what they get with our OS widget. However, if we look at it from the development side of things, building this add-on atop Outlook is a more laborious and complicated process, a whole other world. That’s where we see the big difference between open platforms and closed systems – in how easily can you plug into them.

With the potential that OpenSocial 2.0 offers and the ease that you can build widgets on top of it, I believe that the world will quickly become attuned to getting this kind of experience for many more email clients. People still strongly rely on email in their work and they just need a way to naturally bring those messages into their collaboration process. So, it turns out that email isn’t dead as some claim, it just needed a rebirth, And OpenSocial 2.0 is an essential part of that evolution.

What’s next?

The new generation of apps, built on the open platform, will bring a new wave of innovation and productivity. OpenSocial has already gained support from many players in the enterprise software market. I’m sure we can expect new marketplaces and ecosystems, and faster innovation as others follow suit.

Users will of course be the ones to benefit, but it’s a win-win for everyone, as we continually find new ways to improve the way that we work. Your company’s mission should they choose to accept it? To socialize the enterprise.

Andrew Filev (@andrewsthoughts)
Andrew Filev is a software entrepreneur with more than 10 years of experience in project and product management. He is the founder and CEO of Wrike, a Silicon Valley-based provider of project management and collaboration software. To learn more about Andrew and his views, you can subscribe to his Project Management 2.0 blog or follow him on Twitter (@andrewsthoughts).

Announcing a New OpenSocial and Emerging Social Technology Book

2011-09-08T16:18:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to announce that, as of yesterday, Programming Social Applications is officially out in print. I normally wouldn't post on the OpenSocial blog about my own book but the content is specifically designed for this community, so it's a good fit. Within the book I cover topics on:

Building social applications and containers using Shindig and OpenSocial.
The vast array of features and functionality within the OpenSocial specification.
Front-end code security tools like Caja and ADsafe.
Authentication systems with OpenID
Authorization systems with OAuth 1.0a and 2.0
Emerging social technologies like Activity Streams, Open Graph Protocol, PubSubHubbub, Salmon and others.

I will be conducting a webcast through O'Reilly on October 4th, 2011 at 1pm PDT to talk with everyone about the technology within the book and explore some of the interesting emerging technologies that are upcoming. More details to come shortly.

You can purchase the book here or get a free sample here. For those of you that pick up the book, remember that Chapter 12 (OpenID / OAuth hybrid extension), Appendix I (Environment Setup) and Appendix II (Terms) are offered as an online only download from O'Reilly since the book was getting a little large and we didn't want to simply delete content.

Please send feedback and tell me what you think - I'd love to hear from the community!

List of OpenSocial Containers

2011-08-25T13:45:00.001-07:00

Recently there was a thread going around the OpenSocial and Gadgets Specification discussion board about providing an updated list of OpenSocial containers, both at the open and enterprise levels.

From this discussion, we have put together a living document to provide a list of those OpenSocial containers and implementers that we are aware of, including links to their associated information pages or developer networks. You can view the list here.

We Need Your Help

Since this is a living document, the content will always be changing as new containers surface or if we have left something off of the list. For everyone working with different container implementations, we ask that you review the list and help update the content if something is incorrect or missing. We really need the help from container implementers, users and those of you with an extensive OpenSocial container knowledge base to help out.

Thank you everyone.

Announcing the Release of the OpenSocial 2.0 Specification

2011-08-18T16:28:00.000-07:00

Following the 11:59 PDT voting cutoff last night, version 2.0 of the OpenSocial specification has officially passed with 22 positive and 0 negative votes.

Version 2 of the OpenSocial specification opens up integration with other well known open source social specifications, ties in both a simplified gadget format as well as new powerful tools, plus announces some deprecated features.

Some of the major revisions to the specification include:

Activity Streams support: Activity Stream provides a mechanism for defining rich and detailed social activities, defined in a simple actor / object / target format. The adoption of this open specification allows OpenSocial to not only provide richer data sources but also to be interoperable with more open streams.

Deprecated support for ATOM: It was determined that the ATOM serialization format for OpenSocial information was not being utilized in practice. Since there were a number of adjacent specification utilizing JSON for the preferred data format, the community has decided to deprecate support for ATOM.

Simplified gadget format: Providing a mechanism for embedding template libraries into a gadget specification file, the ability to integrate data pipelining and templating features within a gadget has been greatly simplified.

Embedded Experiences: The community saw a need to provide a mechanism for providing embedded experiences directly within the gadget. By integrating these features, the content host is able to tell a service how to render its content instead of having the service figure it out themselves. This will provide a higher degree of control over data in a gadget.

New Incubating API
- OAuth 2 support: The OpenSocial 2.0 specification now includes support for OAuth 2. Since the OAuth 2.0 specification has not been finalized by the time of this release, OAuth 2 support is currently in an incubating mode. Currently revision 20 of the OAuth 2 specification is being integrated. Support for OAuth 1.0a is still included in the OpenSocial 2.0 specification and has not been deprecated.
- Common Container: In OpenSocial 2.0, a new optional specification has been added for a common container API. The goal is to simplify the container and gadget integration model. It provides a set of common services that Container developers can leverage for features like in-browser Gadget lifecycle event callbacks, embedded experiences, and selection and action handlers.

Here are a few links that will help you get up to speed on the recent changes and additions:

In addition to this announcement, Andrew Davis has another piece of great news on the Shindig side:

Along with releasing the OpenSocial 2.0 spec today, the OpenSocial Foundation is working together with our members companies, and implementor friends at Shindig are proud to announce the availability of the first OpenSocial 2.0 Container, running the latest Shindig 3.0 build, the Open Social Sandbox, at http://sandbox.opensocial2.org:8080/. The site is a live demo of the latest features of the OpenSocial 2.0 spec including Embedded Experiences, Declarative Actions, OpenSearch and powerful new open gadgets APIs to enable gadgets to jump out of the box. The site provides tutorials, demo videos and is geared towards enabling gadget developers immediately to build new gadgets, and test them out on the site through the "Customize" button.

Lastly, I wanted to say thank you to the entire community and dedicated participants who have made this major release possible.

Vote Now! OpenSocial and Open Source Presentations at SXSW

2011-08-17T18:12:00.000-07:00

As a followup to our OpenSocial and SXSW Interactive 2012 post last month, we wanted to make available the links to the OpenSocial and associated technology proposals that have been submitted to the conference.

We would all greatly appreciate it if you could vote up these proposals to ensure that we have a technology presence at the conference next year, presenting the extensive new technology stack that is inherent within OpenSocial 2.0. There are a total of 3178 proposals in for this year and 30% of the decision-making process is up to community votes, so the more votes and comments we can get the better.

The proposals that we have available are:

Distributed Web Frameworks: The Future of Social
Link: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/10692

Revolution! Open Apps Will Change the Enterprise
Link: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/12817

Building Social Apps for Business Using Opensocial
Link: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/12187

If you have a proposal on the technology or features behind OpenSocial I'd be glad to add it into this blog post - please comment on this post with the details.

Thanks everyone.

Building Dynamic Applications with Data Pipelining, Templating and YQL

2011-08-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

Hello again everyone,

Today I wanted to go over one of the interesting things that you can do with OpenSocial using templating and data pipelining. Since these were introduced in version 0.9 of the specification, this functionality will not be available if:

The container that you are using does not support OpenSocial version 0.9 or later.
The container that you are using does not support data pipelining or templating.

With that said, let's get right down to an example. For this example, we're going to go through a few steps in order to scrape and display the recent headlines from Reddit:

We will use data pipelining to load in the headlines from Reddit.
The URL of the data pipe will be a dynamic call to the Yahoo! Query Language (YQL). YQL will be used to scrape the HTML from the page, then use an xpath to drill down to the repeating anchor tags that denote the headlines.
Lastly, from the JSON data that is returned back from YQL into the data pipe, we're going to use OpenSocial templating to display out the headline results.

Let's take a look at the gadget code behind this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<Module>

   <ModulePrefs title="Reddit Headline Fetch"

      title_url="http://www.jcleblanc.com"

      description="Obtains reddit.com headlines via YQL"

      author="Jonathan LeBlanc">

      <Require feature="opensocial-0.9"/>

      <Require feature="opensocial-data" />

      <Require feature="opensocial-templates" />

   </ModulePrefs>

   <Content type="html">

   <![CDATA[

   <script type="text/os-data" xmlns:os="http://ns.opensocial.org/2008/markup">

      <os:HttpRequest key="reddit" href="http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?

      q=select%20*%20from%20html%20where%20url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com

      %22%20and%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20xpath%3D'%2F%2Fa%5B%40class%3D%22title%22%5D'

      &format=json"/>

   </script>

   <script type="text/os-template" require="reddit">

      <ul>

         <li repeat="${reddit.content.query.results.a}">

            <a href="${Cur.href}">${Cur.content}</a>

         </li>

      </ul>

   </script>

   ]]>

   </Content>

</Module>

Let's break down the components of this gadget. First let's start with the meta data within the <ModulePrefs> node. There are three features that we will need to require:

   <Require feature="opensocial-0.9"/>

   <Require feature="opensocial-data" />

   <Require feature="opensocial-templates" />

First we have the OpenSocial version that we want to include. For our needs we can include version 0.9 of the specification since that will allow us to include the other features we need, namely our second and third Require statements for opensocial-data (Data Pipelining) and opensocial-templates (Templating). These three will give us the features that we need for the example.

Next we have the innards of the <Content> node. Let's explore the first <script> block:

   <script type="text/os-data" xmlns:os="http://ns.opensocial.org/2008/markup">

   <os:HttpRequest key="reddit" href="http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?

   q=select%20*%20from%20html%20where%20url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com

   %22%20and%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20xpath%3D'%2F%2Fa%5B%40class%3D%22title%22%5D'

   &format=json"/>

   </script>

This is our data pipelining section. When the gadget loads in the container that we are running it in, this section will issue an HTTP request to populate an object with the return value of the request. In our case this will be a GET request to the YQL service.

To define a data pipe, we set the type of the script block to text/os-data and then define the os XML namespace. Within the script block, we set the object that we want the data returned to to be "reddit". We then issue a data pipelining HTTP GET request to the YQL service, using the href attribute. This URL used includes the following components:

The public YQL URL: http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql
q: The YQL query to run, placed as a query string parameter.
format: The format to return our data in, in our case JSON. This is also placed as a query string parameter.

If we look at the query that we are using, we can see what the components of the request are:

  SELECT * FROM html WHERE url="http://www.reddit.com"

  AND xpath='//a[@class="title"]'

YQL uses a query syntax much akin to SQL. In our request we are using the html table, which defines request functionality to allow us to scrape data from an HTML page and then apply an xpath to drill down to the nodes on the page that we want to capture. In our case, we are capturing all data from http://www.reddit.com where the xpath (or nodes that we want to return) is any anchor tag that contains a class of title. If we explore the source code of http://www.reddit.com we can see that each title on the page is indeed an anchor tag with a class of title. At the end of the request the reddit object should now contain the return value from the request or, in other words, the headlines from the Reddit homepage.

Now let's look at the templating script block:

<script type="text/os-template" require="reddit">

<ul>

   <li repeat="${reddit.content.query.results.a}">

      <a href="${Cur.href}">${Cur.content}</a>

   </li>

</ul>

</script>

This is the block that will define the template for displaying our results. To define a templating script block, we define the type to be "text/os-template" and then we can include the object (in our case from the data pipelining request) that we want to make available to the template - we set this to "reddit" - the same value that we set as the key of the data pipelining request.

Now we can simply define the HTML that we want to use, with the variables, to display our results. For this simple use case we'll simply create an unordered list with all of the headlines displayed as anchor tag links. In OpenSocial templating, we can insert the value from a data source by including the variable that we want to act upon, displaying it in the format ${VARIABLE}. For instance, in our data pipe if we defined our key to be "foo" and in the foo object we have a sub-element named "bar", we could display it using ${foo.bar}. Another aspect about templating that we're going to be taking advantage of is repeaters. This will allow us to repeat a block of code for each object available, and is done so by adding a repeat="${OBJECT}" attribute on the block that should be repeated, in this case the <li> tag. This will create a list item for each headline we encounter.

Now, if we look at the HTML block knowing this, we can see that we are creating a root unordered list node, then creating a list item for each headline we encounter in the Reddit headlines object. The headlines are embedded in the object at reddit.content.query.results.a. Within each list item we display an anchor tag. The href of the anchor is set to that of the headline link and the text of the link is set to the headline that we get back from the query.

Once the gadget has rendered you should be presented with a very unstyled unordered list, which you may then apply CSS on to. Using this type of setup with a service like YQL, data pipelining, and templating, you can create gadgets that render very dynamic content while reducing the amount of coding that is needed.

OpenSocial drives apps for the Consumerprise Era!

2011-07-29T18:31:00.000-07:00

OpenSocial rocks! Plain and simple. On Wednesday, Jive Software hosted an event where we showed off the Jive Apps Market. Thirteen of our app partners were present to demonstrate their killer apps (AppFusions, Appirio, Box, Crowd Factory, Gliffy, Lingotek, RoundPegg, Rypple, SalesCrunch, SolutionSet, SurveyGizmo, ThreeWill, yaM Labs). You can learn more about it in different blogs like Forbes and InformationWeek Brainyard, the Twitter stream, and on the Jive Developer Community.

This is the world's first social enterprise apps market. And it's based on OpenSocial. Each application is an OpenSocial gadget that gets rendered inside a user's Jive Apps dashboard.

Why is OpenSocial such a great fit for this? First of all, it gives us an open, industry standard application model that our partners can use to deliver SaaS based capability that extends and compliments the underlying Jive Platform.

OpenSocial also provides access to the enterprise social graph. You can use the programming model to access the members of your company that you are connected with as well as the member of your groups.

And let's not forget the activity stream! Inside of Jive, OpenSocial applications can post activities into the stream, which enables them to spread virally across the enterprise.

Would we have been able to build and deliver the Jive Apps Market as quickly as we did without OpenSocial? No way. By leveraging the OpenSocial, and building on top of Apache Shindig, we were able to leverage the power of the community, appeal to a broad base of fantastic application developers working at innovative companies, and provide enterprises with the security of working with an industry leading open, standard technology.

Posted by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation & Developer Evangelist, Jive Apps

New OpenSocial Community Groups on Facebook

2011-07-25T13:38:00.000-07:00

Hello Everyone,

This will be a quick update for the OpenSocial community. I wanted to let everyone know that we have two new upcoming avenues for people to reach out to us on Facebook. This will allow us to build more communication channels for those wishing to talk with others who are working with or interested in OpenSocial, or the many open source technologies that it is integrated with.

So, with that said, here are the two new channels on Facebook for to take a look at - a page and a group:

I will be adding and filling in the content on these pages in the coming days so that they are complete. Please feel free to use these channels to engaged with others in the community.

Calling All OpenSocial Container and Application Developers

2011-07-15T07:42:00.000-07:00

Do you work on the implementation of a container or develop applications within existing OpenSocial containers? If so, we’d love to interview you in a new blog post series that will allow developers to showcase the new and innovative things that they are doing with OpenSocial.

We’re especially interested in hearing from the community about:

The challenges you’ve experienced while working with the specification and how you overcame them.
Are there any technologies or specifications that you’ve integrated with an OpenSocial container or application that you believe married well with the OpenSocial specification?
How is OpenSocial being used within enterprise solutions?
How is OpenSocial being used on mobile devices?
Are there any technical implementations that you thought worked especially well? Code implementations to showcase these integrations are always welcome.
Do you have any helpful tips, techniques or snippets that have been useful to you in the past?

Using these “OpenSocial in the wild” posts, we’re hoping to hear more voices from the community and give creators the spotlight. These are the people that are on the front lines, implementing, and hearing from them what works, what failed, and what customers took to as far as features will allow us all to better understand how this technology is being used.

If you would like to be heard, please e-mail me at nakedtechnologist at gmail dot com and tell me, in brief, what you’re doing with OpenSocial. I’ll ask you a series of questions from that initial overview and then feature you in our new “OpenSocial in the wild” blog posts.

Thank you.

OpenSocial and SXSW Interactive 2012

2011-07-08T13:17:00.000-07:00

On June 20th, SXSW Interactive announced that they have opened their panel picker for submissions to the 2012 SXSW Interactive festival.

With all of the community efforts going on around OpenSocial 2.0, this would be a perfect time to submit a panel or talk on the wonderful efforts going on for OpenSocial and we ask that, as a community, we get involved in spreading the word around the integrated technology that are revitalizing the landscape of social application and container development.

An official panel will be submitted to discuss the new standards and technologies that are being integrated within OpenSocial 2.0. This will cover much of the work done on the specification, the future of OpenSocial, our enterprise involvement and the technology backbone that the new specification is being built around.

We would also love to see other members of the community submit talks about some of their involvements with OpenSocial. For instance, we'd love to see submissions about some of the following, just to name a few:

How OpenSocial foundations and techniques can be applied in a mobile strategy.
How new authorization models like OAuth 2 are fostering adoption of open standards.
How standardization of activities through Activity Streams are building a foundation for social sharing across platforms.
How OpenSocial is driving the socialization and communication channels of enterprise platform solutions.

If you submit a panel or talk, please respond to this thread to let us know (with a link to that talk) and I will work on compiling a list of the "OpenSocial community talks" for a future blog post. This will allow us to all vote as a community and show each other some support.

You can submit your talks here.

I look forward to hearing from all of you.

Open App Revolution storms IBM Innovate 2011

2011-06-24T06:44:00.000-07:00

IBM Innovate

OSLC

Even better, by using OpenSocial gadgets it all ran within a Jazz Dashboard and potentially any other OpenSocial container. Here is a preview video put together just before Innovate. Products shown are Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager, Rational Requirements Composer, and Rational ClearQuest.

The demonstration was a big success! Attendees were excited by the opportunities of the social integration to change how they and their users work every day. This work is still at the "proof of concept" stage. However, you can track the progress of the work and get involved by following the OpenSocial spec list and Apache Shindig code base.

Viva La OpenAppRevolution!

Post on behalf of Matt Marum, Senior Engineer, IBM, by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation

OpenAppRevolution at E2.0!!

2011-06-13T08:59:00.000-07:00

We are continuing our momentum that we built from the OpenSocial State of the Union where we kicked off the "Open App Revolution"! OpenSocial will be present at a number of upcoming conferences and community driven events in the next few months.

We've working with the organizers of the E2.0 conference and they are excited to extend the OpenSocial community an invitation to the conference, with significant savings to you! Here's E2.0 exclusive invitation to the OpenSocial Community:

Hello members of the Open Social community!

It’s our pleasure to welcome you the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, June 20-23^rd at the Hynes Convention Center. The Open Social Foundation is supporting a number of important programs at the upcoming conference and will be on hand to educate conference attendees on the latest developments on Open Social.

As a member of the Open Social community you can take advantage of the following offer. Register today to get a free Expo Pass or save up to $400 off Conference Passes* with Priority Code CPGGEB01. Get a Full Conference pass for access to the conference, workshops, expo pavilion, Launch Pad, free programs, and keynotes and general sessions covering the spectrum of Enterprise 2.0.

See you in BostonEnterprise 2.0 Conference

There will be a number of our key OpenSocial leaders there, e.g. Matt Tucker, the Board member from Jive Software will be on a panel discussing the value of OpenSocial in the Enterprise. We'll also have four speaking sessions where we will be covering the exciting work going on with version 2.0. Here's the schedule of speakers in the theatre. (Make sure to confirm the times when you're at the confernence.)

Date/Time	Topic	Presenter
Tuesday 4:00pm	Enterprise App Markets	Matt Tucker, CTO Jive Software
Tuesday 4:30pm	App Sandbox & Embedded Experience	Andrew Davis, IBM
Wednesday 12:00pm	OpenSocial Apps in Mobile	David Robinson, IBM
Wednesday 4:30pm	Activity Streams	David Robinson, IBM

We'll also have a table manned by David, Matt, and a few others who will be there to help you understand the value of an open, community driven standard, that can drive the next generation fo business applications, on prem or in the cloud.

We are excited about E2.0 and can't wait to see you there!!!

Viva la OpenAppRevolution!

Posted by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation

Go play in the sandbox!

2011-06-01T06:50:00.000-07:00

OpenSocial 2.0 Container Open to All!
At the OpenSocial State of the Union on May 12th we (Andrew Davis (IBM) and Ryan Baxter (IBM)) announced that we have built a sandbox environment for app developers to test their apps agains the OpenSocial 2.0 specification.

We have built a sample collaboration application that contains an activity stream, inbox, and an area to render arbitrary gadgets. The sandbox is based on a daily build of Shindig 3.0 which is the reference implementation for OpenSocial 2.0. Gadget developers who are interested in building applications for OpenSocial 2.0 containers can go to the sandbox and add any gadget they please to test it out.

Future Plans
We plan to continue to work on the sandbox to refine it and make it more complete. The social data in the collaboration application is not very robust, and we'd like to include a more complete set so developers can better test their applications. If you've got ideas, let us know--there's lots of ways you can help!

The data in the inbox and activity stream is static and will remain that way but they plan to add functionality so developers can add their own activities and emails for a given session. This will be key for testing OpenSocial gadgets that use embedded experiences. There are also several pieces of the OpenSocial specification which have not been implemented in the container yet. For example, gadget preferences, pubsub2, and some gadget to container APIs like gadget.window.setTitle.

Over the coming weeks and months we'll work implementing the missing pieces from the specification so the sandbox is more complete. We've also reached out to the Shindig community so a daily build of Shindig is automatically deployed to the server. This will allow app developers to develop gadgets against cutting edge OpenSocial proposals. At some point the application will become part of Shindig, allowing the community to continue to enhance the sandbox as the specification progresses.

We would love to hear your feedback so please post your ideas to speciification's Google group.

Posted on behalf of Ryan Baxter and Andrew Davis by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation

Be A Revolutionary!

2011-05-18T07:04:00.000-07:00

On May 12, 2011, the OpenSocial community came together for the annual State of the Union event. That day will be remembered as the start of the “Open App Revolution!” (#openapprevolution) A special thank you to Google, who was kind enough to host us at their offices in San Francisco, CA. (Tweet: “Thanks Google & Paul Lindner for hosting the OpenSocial State of the Union #ossotu #OpenSocial #openapprevolution”)

The event featured were a number of prominent speakers at the event discussing what’s coming in OpenSocial 2.0. Monica Wilkenson and Evan Prodromou discussed the value of Activity Streams and the importance of aligning this work with the spec. Several folks from IBM, Ryan Baxter, & Andrew Davis, demonstrated how OpenSocial based applications can be embedded directly in the stream.

Even more exciting was work that is being done to enable apps on mobile devices. Jason Gary, Andy Smith, also from IBM, showed the same OpenSocial application running on seven different mobile devices. Jason & IBM committed to the OpenSocial community to have all the code contributed to Apache Shindig! This is great news for the community and will significantly advance and accelerate apps on mobile! (Tweet: “Can’t wait for Road Trip and Chassis to be in Shindig!!-Thx Jason #openapprevolution”)

Paul Lindner discussed the roadmap for Apache Shindig. Most implementations of OpenSocial are based on Shindig, and his presentation demonstrated how vibrant and active development is on the code base. This was followed by Chris Cole demonstrating the simplicity and power of the advanced features of OpenSocial, including templating and data-pipelining. Matt Null from Survey Gizmo talked about his experience building an application that works on three different containers, Jive, SAP, and iGoogle—with more to come.

We concluded the State of the Union with an engaging panel discussion the focused on the business value of building applications and the economics of app markets. The panel consisted of Chris Kohlhardt from Gliffy, Ryan Nichols from Appirio, Mark Halvorson from Attlasian, Jeff Hotchkiss from Xobni, and was moderated by Robin Bordoli of Jive. You can find many of the slides from the event on the OpenSocial wiki. We'll continue to post the videos as we get them.

2011 – The year of Business Applications

2010 was more than just a growth year for OpenSocial. With the expanded set of consumer targeted social networks, an increase in domain specific social networks, and the adoption of OpenSocial as a platform technology by enterprise vendors, OpenSocial has established itself as the fundamental technology driver of the app based economy. In 2011 we will see application market places from enterprise vendors like Jive, Xobni, and Atlassian—all based on OpenSocial.

Open technology is the foundation of the Web. This is the time for application providers to leverage these platforms and market places to break down the barriers of software acquisition, open up new delivery channels, and change the way business gets done. Innovative companies like Gliffy and Surveygizmo are great examples of the new way to build and deliver powerful business applications.

The time is NOW for an Open App Revolution.

This is YOUR call to arms.

Be A Revolutionary!

Posted by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation

Xobni Opens Outlook to Developers via OpenSocial API

2011-05-03T14:53:00.000-07:00

At Xobni, we’ve long been fans and part of the OpenSocial community and are pumped to be bringing this philosophy to Microsoft Outlook.

As the leading add-on for Outlook, the Xobni team has invested years learning how to live nicely in the software. It sure ain’t easy, and it’s not been cheap, but it’s worth it.

The average Outlook user spends north of 30% of their day in email. So we’ve got some pretty incredible real estate on the 7 million installs of Xobni. The rest of user’s computer time is spent bouncing back and forth between browsers, software and services. To chip away at this bounce, we began bringing third party content directly into Outlook via the Xobni sidebar in 2009. We started with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. These gadgets are still a favorite feature among our users – and play to Bill Gates’ statement in 2008 that Xobni is “the next generation of social networking.”

Today, we’re unveiling the OpenSocial-powered Xobni Gadget Store, providing developers with an easier path into Outlook. We believe that this will enhance users’ productivity and engagement with the services they use and love, and let developers benefit from our experience (good and bad) in Outlook.

Xobni Gadget Store = OpenSocial + Contextual Gadgets + Xobni Data

Xobni has created an OpenSocial container on top of the interesting data Xobni already discovers for you from your email. Basically, Xobni knows who you know – and how important they are to you (Xobni Rank). This effectively means that we build a social graph from your inbox, and provide access to that graph to your trusted services through the OpenSocial API. Gadgets can be viewed in the Xobni sidebar (“profile” view) or in the email message body (“card” view, similar to the Gmail contextual gadget implementation).

Here are a handful of the 20 gadgets announced today that are now available in the new Xobni Gadget Store. Each gadget offers a personalized experience based on the related email or profile.

Evernote – take and search for notes on a person or company, and have your notes automatically associated with their email address or Xobni profile.
Dropbox – quickly choose files to share with anyone in your inbox
JIRA – Get a real-time view of any bug mentioned or linked to in an email. Make edits to the bug, add comments, re-assign, and more – without leaving Outlook.
Salesforce – Create a Salesforce contact or lead from any Xobni profile; view existing records as well.
WebEx – Schedule a one-click meeting or schedule a meeting in advance without needing to leave Outlook. See upcoming meetings and quickly send reminders to the tardy folks

We’re proud to be the first company to bring OpenSocial platform to Outlook in a meaningful way. We believe that extending the reach of the OpenSocial community to the hundreds of millions of users in Outlook is exciting and look forward to seeing what a more open Outlook future brings.

We’re hosting an event at our offices in San Francisco, CA the day before Google I/O open to all developers interested in hacking and exploring how to work their product or services into Outlook in a meaningful way. The event/hack is May 9 from 2:00 – 6:00pm. Some developers will be offered the opportunity to present their hack to the guests, including judges Michael Arrington/TechCrunch, Joseph Smarr/Google and David Lee/SV Angel. Space is limited. RSVP here.

Developers unable to attend, but interested about learning more about creating Xobni Gadgets can visit http://www.xobni.com/developer/.

Posted on behalf of Xobni, by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundaiton

OpenSocial State of the Union 2011!!

2011-04-07T06:45:00.001-07:00

The OpenSocial Foundation cordially invites you to attend the annual State of the Union event on May 12, 2011, from 1:00pm to 5:00pm. This is your chance to learn first hand about the exciting new happenings taking place in the community. In addition to presentations from members of our community, there will be two additional opportunities for you to be directly involved, the pre-SOTU interop event, and the Happy Hour/Poster Session!

Don't sit on the sidelines--get involved!!

There will be a Happy Hour & Poster Session immediately following the State of the Union from 5:00pm ~ 7:00pm. You are welcome, and encouraged to use this as an opportunity to share your ides. Simply sign up on the OpenSocial wiki page. This will be a great chance to learn about all the wickedly cool stuff happening with OpenSocial. And don't forget to bring your laptop. What goes better with a cold beverage than a bit of hot code?

Attend the pre-SOTU interop & spec working session!

Got a gadget? Got a container? Now's your chance to meet the developers of applications and containers and get "interoping". From 8:30am to 12:00pm (location TBD) there will be an an opportunity for application providers to work directly with container providers to demonstrate the interoperability and portability of OpenSocial based applications. The wiki page is under construction and will be updated as we fill in the details.

OpenSocial 2.0 is under development!

There are some incredibly exciting proposals out there, e.g Embedded Experiences and Activity Streams. Not to mention mobile. The pre-SOTU event will also be an opportunity for specification authors to work together on many of the exciting 2.0 proposals.

I look forward to seeing you and, of course, encourage you to get involved and participate. All are welcome to attend both events. However, space is limited so please use eventbrite to register in advance.

OpenSocial State of the Union

Pre-SOTU Interop and Specification Working Session

If you've got any questions, drop a note on the OpenSocial Community group.

The Web is better when it's OpenSocial!

Mark Weitzel

President, OpenSocial Foundation

Community Elections 2011: The Polls are open!!!

2011-01-10T22:34:00.000-08:00

The election for the OpenSocial Foundation's Community Board representative is now open. If you are a member, you should have received an email directing you to submit your ballot. The election will close at 11:59 PM PDT on Friday, January 21, 2011. You can find information on each person that has been nominated on the candidate info page.

One of these candidates will be elected by the community to serve on the OpenSocial Foundation's Board of Directors. As a reminder, the role of the OpenSocial Foundation is to promote the OpenSocial specification, and to help ensure that it remains freely implementable by all, in perpetuity. You can find more information about the foundation by visiting the OpenSocial Foundation FAQ.

If you have not submitted a membership application to the OpenSocial Foundation, and would like to have your voice heard in this election you still may do so. To be eligible to vote in the current election, you must complete the OpenSocial Foundation membership application (it's free) by 11:59 PM PDT on Sunday, January 16, 2011.

If you have any questions or comments about the election please visit the OpenSocial community forum.

Posted by Mark Weitzel, President OpenSocial Foundation

Happy New Year, OpenSocial!!

2011-01-05T06:53:00.000-08:00

I'd like to congratulate the OpenSocial community on an incredible 2010! Even though it seemd to fly by, it's worth taking a quick look back at all the things, that, as a community, we were able to accomplish in 2010.

Not just one release, but two!
In 2010, we published OpenSocial 1.0, which represented a significant step in maturing and stabilizing the specification and programming model. In November, 1.1 was released. This included new capabilities for inter-gadget communication (pub/sub), which is a major requirement for enterprise vendors who are adopting OpenSocial. 1.1 also included the first extension--the OpenSocial WAP Specification.

New Board Members & Officers
During 2010, the Board of Directors appointed a completely new set of officers. One of the telltale signs of a strong and vibrant organization, especially one that consists of volunteers, is it's ability to gracefully handle change. Kudos to the OpenSocial Board and Officers (present company excepted) for handling this with grace and professionalism. During this transition, IBM and Jive Software joined OpenSocial's Board. Because they are Corporate Designators, these companies, along with the three founding members, Yahoo!, Google, and MySpace, have made a financial commitment to OpenSocial. Combined with their excellent technical resources that work on advancing the specification and, in many cases, open source code, OpenSocial is positioned to remain a key Internet technology for years to come.

Your Vote, Your Voice 2010
In 2010, we had privilege of electing two Community representatives, Paul Lindner and Mark Halvorson, to OpenSocial's Board. Both of these gentlemen continue to set the bar very high for their commitment to OpenSocial and involvement in our community. Paul's leadership of Apache Shindig ensures that there is a proven, open source implementation of OpenSocial available to all. Mark Halvorson has worked to get our Web presence organized by working with Atlassian to host OpenSocial's new Wiki. While we are not quite done migrating this over yet, this is a significant step forward for the community as it provides a more secure and stable infrastructure. Thanks to both Paul and Mark for all of their hard work in 2010.

Can you say OpenSocial in three languages?
Thanks to Shindig, OpenSocial has long been available in PHP and Java. In 2010, MySpace announced plans to contribute a significant portion of their .Net infrastructure to open source. This will provide another implementation language for OpenSocial and, hopefully, will open up an avenue for a new set of developers. Way to go MySpace!

The year of the enterprise
In 2008, OpenSocial exploded in popularity and adoption in consumer facing social networks. In 2010, a similar explosion occurred among enterprise vendors. The year started with the publication of the Enterprise OpenSocial Whitepaper. At Google IO, Atlassian, Cisco, IBM, and Jive Software, presented a technical session on how OpenSocial is a key underlying technology in their Enterprise offerings. The year culminated with the first ever Enterprise Interop event. Participants from Appirio, Atlassian, Cisco, IBM, Jive Software, Magento, Oracle, PayPal, SAP and others worked together to get a variety of applications running on multiple containers. While this event illustrated to us that we still have work to do to attain the interoperability that we want, overall, it was a huge success. We were able to demonstrate several applications running in multiple containers unchanged. More importantly, we were able to continue the momentum in collectively proving OpenSocial ready for the Enterprise.

Growing our community
One of the great things about an open community is getting the opportunity to work with a diverse set of people across a broad spectrum of industries. There's literally no limit to the energy and ideas that come from working together. This was no more evident than in two great community events this year, the OpenSocial State of the Union, and the OpenSocial Europe/OpenSocial in Education Summit. Thank you again to MySpace and SURFnet for organizing and hosting these events.

Welcome 2011!
With a year like 2010 behind us, it would be easy to sit back and relax. Hardly! Work is already underway defining and implementing OpenSocial 2.0. We've got an aggressive schedule and are targeting to have an implementor's draft at the end of Q1/2011.

If 2010 was "the year of the Enterprise", we've got to make 2011 "the year of interop". Collectively, we'll need to improve interoperability of OpenSocial applications. Part of this will be continuing to mature the specification, but it will also mean more interoperability events--and opportunities for you to get involved.

Your Vote, Your Voice: 2011
Finally, this is a reminder that we'll start 2011 off with elections for the Community Representative to the OpenSocial Foundation Board of Directors. Nominations are open until January 9th.

Given there's been so much accomplished in 2010, I'm sure I've failed to mention something. I guess that's what comments & replies are for! While I couldn't possibly name everyone that's working hard to make OpenSocial a success, on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation, and the Community--Thank you, and congratulations on a great 2010!

Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation
The Web is better when it's OpenSocial!

Become an OpenSocial Board Member! Nominations are open!

2010-12-05T23:41:00.000-08:00

As President of OpenSocial, I'm pleased to announce that the nominations for the Community Elected Board seat are now Open! The nomination period will run from December 6, 2010 through Jan 9, 2011, when voting will commence.

Anyone OpenSocial member is able to serve on the board. The only requirement to nominate or hold the position is that you must be a member of the OpenSocial Foundation. There are no membership fees to join OpenSocial. All you need to do is fill out a simple on-line membership application.

Posted by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation

Calling .Net developers!

2010-12-05T23:33:00.000-08:00

Myspace has always been committed to open standards and the open Internet. The Myspace Developer Platform team is taking the next logical step and will be open sourcing our internally developed Myspace OpenSocial Gadget container. Now there will be a high quality and highly scalable .Net implementation of an OpenSocial Gadget container available to the community. This will provide an excellent complement to the Java and PHP based containers developed by the Shindig project as we continue to support OpenSocial as one of the foundational building blocks of the open web.

Posted on behalf of Chris Cole, Principal Software Architect, MySpace Developer Platform by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation

Mixi's new platform feature: "Apps for Touch"

2010-11-24T07:48:00.000-08:00

My name is Yoichiro Tanaka, I am in charge of the architect of mixi Platform. mixi is the most popular social networking service in Japan. We are happy to announce that a smart-phone platform has been launched on mixi Platform.

mixi Platform supports OpenSocial v0.8.1 and have executed applications for two devices “PC desktop” and “Japanese feature-phones” last year. The specification of our feature-phone platform has been proposed as the “OpenSocial WAP extension”, and this specification has been adopted by other platforms in Japan. If you would like to know more, please check the link below:

Recently, we have launched a new feature to mixi Platform. We call it “mixi apps for Touch”. The saturation level of smart-phones is currently increasing in Japan as many people already use the iPhone, and there are many release plans of smart-phones based on Android. Currently, 17 applications have already been launched as mixi apps for Touch, and these developers have attracted many users. The below image is the screenshot of one mixi application executed on the smart-phone. A single mixi application can support three devices -- PCs, feature-phones and smrt-phones at same time.

Figure 1. Screenshots of mixi apps for Touch

Basically, mixi apps for Touch is a Web browser based application and is not a native iPhone/Android application which you download from an application market/store. Technically, the view name of mixi apps for Touch is “touch”, and the value of the type attribute is specified as “url”. This definition is written in gadget spec file with definitions for other devices. The below image is the architecture to describe mixi apps for Touch.

Figure 2. Architecture of mixi apps for Touch

The application is executed in the iframe placed on mixi’s page. One of mixi app’s features is that the domain in the iframe is not mixi’s domain, and is of the developer’s server. Therefore, application developers can generate the contents on his/her server similarly to developing a general web site.

Developers need the OpenSocial RESTful API to use social data, and a 2-legged OAuth is adopted to the authorization mechanism. On the other hand, when developers want to use APIs (invitation, posting activity, and etc) with a user-flow (need to show Popup window), a JavaScript file provided by mixi Platform is loaded by using a script tag. The function written in the script file calls the function which exists on the parent frame, and the user-flow will be executed. Of course, Payment and Ad programs are available for monetization (the Payment API is based on OpenSocial Virtual Currency API).

We believe that our platform will be able to bring OpenSocial more scaling to many devices. For more information, please visit our developer’s site “mixi Developer Center”.

For more information, please visit the mixi Developer Center.

Posted on behalf of Yoichiro Tanaka, mixi, Inc., by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation

OpenSocial 1.1 Published!

2010-11-18T19:05:00.000-08:00

The OpenSocial Foundation is pleased to announce the community has approved the publication of version 1.1 of the specification.

In addition to general clarifications, this release now defines the API that enable gadgets to communicate with each other via a pub/sub mechanism. In addition to the API, the specification also defines metadata that an application can include that specifies the events it is able to publish and subscribe. This enables OpenSocial providers to leverage this metadata in tools and advanced container capability.

Using this new API and metadata, developers of OpenSocial applications (gadgets), can create highly interactive mashups where components are not just assembled on the glass, but integrated with each other. This capability is especially important in enterprise settings where OpenSocial is being increasingly utilized as key Internet technology.

Congratulations to the community on another great release!

Published by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation