OpenSocial API Blog

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

OpenSocial community defines version 0.9

2009-04-17T12:20:00.000-07:00

A new version of the OpenSocial Specification hit the presses yesterday -- packed full of new features to make writing, testing, and maintaining apps much easier. From a streamlined JavaScript API, to a more efficient way to communicate between the app and your server, many of the OpenSocial v0.9 updates aim to make coding and rendering apps blazing fast.

If you're not familiar with the specification process, here's how OpenSocial evolves from one version to the next:

New ideas are proposed and discussed on the spec list (which anyone can contribute to).
Proposals that are selected by the community are prototyped to flesh out the details.
After a vote, the new version of the spec is published.
Containers implement support for the new spec.
App developers start using the new features.

Luckily, many of the prototypes for these new features were implemented in Apache Shindig, so they'll be coming to a container near you in short order. Keep an eye on your favorite container's blog for announcements (like this one) about when v0.9 features will be ready for you to check out.

Many of the folks who contributed to OpenSocial v0.9 will be at Google I/O in San Francisco on May 27-28. We love to talk about this stuff, so check out the Google I/O site to sign up and join us.

Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, on behalf of the OpenSocial Community

Japan's Mixi Announces Open Beta Launch of its OpenSocial Container

2009-04-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

My name is Yoichiro Tanaka. I belong to the Platform Team of mixi, Inc. “mixi” is currently the most popular Japanese social networking service (SNS) and has more than 16.3 million registered users. I am happy to announce that we have released an open beta of “mixi apps, ” which is based on OpenSocial. The first release of the “mixi apps” container (runtime environment) was in last December, but this was only to select companies. However as of April 8th, we've opened the door to all developers!

Background

"mixi" was 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 several communities, share pictures and music with friends, etc.

In addition to those basic features, we have been developing the mixi Platform and working with our partners (service providers or developers) on enhancing the "mixi" service for users. “mixi apps” is one of our services which lets social application providers develop applications that use social graphs formed in mixi, and provide these applications to mixi users. To achieve this, we thought OpenSocial would be the best solution.

Supported Features

OpenSocial core APIs (People, Activities and Persistence).
The gadgets "core" and "feature-Specific" APIs (The gadgets APIs are mostly supported in the open beta with full support coming in the production release).
A mixi specific "Community API," which allows application access to mixi community (or group) information along with its members.

Upcoming Supported Features

OpenSocial's RESTful Protocol will be supported in the near future as "mixi Connect."
The mixi platform will also support a photo album API, among other APIs.

Timeline

Closed beta release - December 2008
Open beta release - Available now!
Consumer launch - first half of 2009

To learn more about mixi's new OpenSocial platform please visit:

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

To support and engage our new mixi social applications development community, on April 23rd we will hold our first ever mixi OpenSocial developers conference, "mixi Appli Conference 2009." In addition to providing detailed information on how to build applications for "mixi apps," we will also talk about "mixi fund," which is a program that offers financial support to social application developers. More information on this conference can be found at:

http://mixi.co.jp/mixiappli-event/ (Note: this site is also in Japanese)

We believe our upcoming production release of "mixi apps" and overall support of the OpenSocial standards will enable us easily continue innovating on compelling future social services for our users.

Posted by Yoichiro Tanaka, mixi OpenSocial Architect

Important OAuth signing changes coming to a container near you

2009-04-01T17:43:00.000-07:00

Although OAuth and OpenSocial make a powerful combination, it's important for developers to know specific implementation details for each container. If you're a developer using the OpenSocial REST and RPC protocols, either with the client libraries or by rolling-your-own implementation, we wanted to let you know about two fundamental changes coming to Shindig which are intended to simplify the implementation and use of OAuth.

First, using content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded in any client to server requests will be strictly prohibited. Instead, we recommend using application/json, application/xml, or application/atom+xml.

Second, in addition to the current method of body signing (which treats the entire body as a query parameter), a new implementation will be made available called the request body hash. Developers should use one method or the other, not both, on any given request. When available, the client libraries will default to using the request body hash.

Here's a bit of background on these changes:

In order to verify that requests sent by developers to OpenSocial containers are actually coming from a trusted source, they are cryptographically signed. The container verifies signature to check that the request originated from the developer and to ensure that the details of the request have not been intercepted or modified by a third party.

In most cases, this turns out just fine, but incompatibilities and inconsistencies arise when you happen to send a request containing "&" or "=" characters in the body, such as this request to update appdata:

[{"params":{"groupId":"@self","appId":"@app","userId":"@viewer","data":{"testkey":"a=b&b=c"},"fields":"testkey"},"id":"add","method":"appdata.update"}]

When such a body is sent along with a content-type of application/x-www-form-urlencoded, Java Shindig (following the Java servlet spec) assumes that the "&" and "=" characters delineate key/value pairs of form data (it's x-www-form-urlencoded after all). When these parameters are reordered and put together as part of the OAuth signing process, the new signature will not match the one sent by the developer (who treats the request body as one giant parameter instead of several, as intended). Thus, the request fails.

However, when the content-type of the request body is properly disclosed (application/json in this case), Java Shindig will treat the body as one parameter, thereby avoiding any conflicts with either the spec or the "&" and "=" characters. In addition, support for the request body hash does away with the non-standard behavior of putting the request body into the signature base string, substituting a hash in its place. It's quite elegant, and far simpler from an implementation standpoint.

For more history and discussion, see this thread in the OpenSocial and gadgets spec group.

What this means for you as a developer:

If you've been dreading the part where I say "go implement this in your code," fear not. We've released new versions of each of the client libraries (Java, PHP, Python, Ruby) which support the changes, while maintaining backwards compatibility.

Starting today, the iGoogle and orkut sandboxes are incorporating these changes to let you start testing right away

If you have any questions on the client library changes, feel free to ask in the client libraries group.

Posted by Dan Holevoet, Google Developer Programs

eBay announces Selling Manager Apps beta, opens up platform to gadget developers

2009-04-01T10:24:00.000-07:00

My name is Farhang Kassaei, I am a platform architect at eBay.

We are very excited to announce that our Selling Manager (SM) suite of productivity tools is now offered as a gadget container - with the same extensibility technology behind OpenSocial. In other words, eBay Selling Manager is now OPEN as a beta platform to ALL developers. This is a great opportunity for developers to have direct access to professional sellers who manage their businesses on eBay.

With our beta platform launch today the SM sandbox is open to anyone with an eBay developer account. If you have not signed up for the eBay Developers Program yet, join for FREE at http://developer.ebay.com/join. If you are already a member of our developer community, visit http://developer.ebay.com/smapps for all the information you need to get started.

eBay will be opening up applications within Selling Manager to all sellers later this summer so this is the perfect time to get on board and get your application user-ready and tested. Also, don't forget to attend our annual Developer Conference in San Jose this June where we’ll be offering hands-on training for Selling Manager Applications. Visit our Developers Conference web site for more details.

Now, let me tell you a bit about the Selling Manager Apps. Although the SM apps are built on top of gadget specifications, they are not the typical OpenSocial applications (for one, eBay does not have a traditional traversable social graph). The SM Apps are productivity tools for eBay sellers, such as tools that allow sellers to manage customer questions more effectively, or to handle shipping and handling of sold items, or to identify and graph marketplace trends in pricing. Like any small business, eBay sellers value tools that make them more efficient and maximize their profitability.

What is most exciting about SM Apps is that you can make money. You choose how much you would like to charge for your applications and get paid by your subscribers. eBay handles billing your subscribers, processing their payments and distributing the funds to you thorough your PayPal account.

eBay is excited to be part of the OpenSocial/Gadget community. Our goal is to make development of commercial applications as open as developing social applications. Check out our Selling Manager beta platform hub at http://developer.ebay.com/smapps, and make sure to let us know how you think we’re doing.

Posted by Farhang Kassaei, Platform Architect, eBay

Japan's goo home social network launches OpenSocial developer sandbox

2009-03-30T11:06:00.000-07:00

My name is Eiji Kitamura, and I am the OpenSocial architect at "goo," one of the biggest portal sites in Japan with over 43 million unique visitors per month. I'm happy to announce that we've recently launched an OpenSocial developer sandbox for the "goo home" social network site (SNS).

The new goo developer sandbox is open to anyone, and we welcome developers to start building and testing OpenSocial applications on our platform. Please be advised however, that the site is in currently only in Japanese.

Background

"goo Home" originally launched in October 2007 with the goal of making the web more social. It lets users create a profile, build relationships with friends, and share all kinds of activities through blog posts, bookmarks, locations on map, videos, pictures, restaurant reviews, etc. However, when we launched these services in 2007, the technology was proprietary. Now, they are implemented using standard OpenSocial technologies!

OpenSocial Supported Features

Here are some details of the OpenSocial API support offered by goo:

Full support for core OpenSocial areas

AppData
People/Person
Activities

Gadget rendering support for 'home', 'profile', and 'canvas' views
Extensive privacy controls on personal attributes. (ex: not returning attributes when set as private by user)
Specific support for viral features:

requestCreateActivity(with permission control)

MediaItem supported

requestShareApp
requestPermission (requests one time permission for profile viewer's personal information)

Note: OpenSocial REST/RPC services are not yet supported, but we expect to support them in the near future.

In addition to general support of OpenSocial application development, we've expanded the social features in the following areas:

Added feed import functionality for 30 external services
Emoji (emoticon) support
opensocial-jquery support (courtesy of Nobuhiro Nakajima)

Launch Timeline

Developer Sandbox - Available now!
Consumer Launch - Late April, 2009

Getting Started

All OpenSocial developers who have a basic knowledge of Japanese can get started today by registering an account at goo's developer sandbox (http://developer.home.goo.ne.jp/).

On our developer site you'll also find plenty of helpful OpenSocial technical information with detailed documentation on our OpenSocial support. (Note: all content is in Japanese.)

We hope the support of OpenSocial standards in our new platform inspires new and uniquely Japanese innovations for the evolution of the social web!

Posted by Eiji Kitamura, Architect, NTT Resonant Inc.

Netlog's first Developer Day - April 2, 2009 at Kinepolis in Brussels (Belgium)

2009-03-24T11:30:00.001-07:00

Netlog is a fun community counting more than 40 million members all over the world. With more than 60% of our users between the ages of 14 and 24, we can also say that Netlog is the favourite place for many youths to meet online. We joined the OpenSocial initiative at the beginning of 2008, and since that time we have been improving our platform for users and developers alike. After more than a year on OpenSocial we have many stories to share.

If you'd like to learn from our team and from other developers who have been building great applications for Netlog users, here is an open invitation for you: on April 2nd we will be hosting our first Developer Day at Kinepolis in Brussels, Belgium. This is a one-day, free admission event.

We'll dedicate the morning to sharing information about our APIs, gaming platform, localization technology and monetization possibilities, and will also offer you a codelab in the afternoon.

Mark your calendar and start spreading the word! Email us at netlogday@netlog.com if you have any questions.

We'll be thrilled to have you join us. For more info, check out our blog post.

For more information about Netlog’s OpenSocial implementation go to http://en.netlog.com/go/developer/opensocial.

Update: For those interested in the codelab portion of Netlog's Developer Day, we wanted to provide some additional details. The Netlog team will be joined by members of the Google team for the afternoon codelab, and agencies such as BBDO and Thesedays will be showing how they integrated Netlog’s Brand Integration Platform into their clients’ online marketing strategies. BBDO and Thesedays will also share insights on how they succeeded in capturing the attention of Netlog's enthusiastic, young, active community.

Posted by Folke Lemaitre, VP Engineering, Netlog

Introducing the OpenSocial Development Environment

2009-03-19T12:03:00.000-07:00

With the OpenSocial Development Environment (OSDE), you no longer need an online OpenSocial container environment to build your applications. OSDE is a new Eclipse plugin that lets you develop either OpenSocial JavaScript (gadget) client applications or OpenSocial Java client applications using OpenSocial 0.8's REST/RPC protocols, entirely within the Eclipse development environment.

OSDE is the creation of Yoichiro Tanaka, an expert software developer and leading pioneer in OpenSocial development from Japan. Yoichiro has also published a book on OpenSocial development in Japan.

Installing the OSDE plugin onto Eclipse 3.4.1 (or later) takes only minutes, and you can be up and running with a fully self-contained OpenSocial development environment. OSDE provides a complete social network environment in a single plugin, along with the necessary tools to easily manage your environment's social data. Additionally, you won't need to create multiple accounts on a social network for testing your applications. This can come in handy if you happen to feel inspired to create a new OpenSocial app while on a plane!

Architectural Highlights

OSDE is able to provide a complete, standalone development environment because it bundles the same code running on many OpenSocial containers today into a single Eclipse plug-in: for serving gadgets and OpenSocial data, Apache Shindig is bundled along with a compact Java H2 database, allowing for social data persistence. OSDE also uses Hibernate for Java Object Relational mapping of the OpenSocial data entities: people, activities, and data. Plus, OSDE bundles the OpenSocial Java client library so its wizards can quickly generate runnable Java client applications that use OpenSocial's REST/RPC protocols.

Feature Highlights

OSDE also includes development features that greatly enhance OpenSocial development:

OpenSocial project creator wizards for both JavaScript/gadget client apps, as well as Java client applications that use the REST/RPC protocols.
A re-entrant gadget specification editor that enables efficient editing of OpenSocial gadget properties, views, locale settings, user preferences as well as gadget and spec/JavaScript source code.
An OpenSocial console view that shows the console output of the local Shindig/H2 social engine, as well as tabbed views for directly managing the onboard People, Activities and AppData persisted social data.

OSDE users can use the social database console to edit their own custom social data (such as people, friend relationships, activities etc.), or they can simply load the sample social data that comes with Apache Shindig's 'Sample Container' application.

For more information on how to use OSDE, checkout the OSDE tutorial (which includes a screencast) and visit the OSDE homepage.

Posted by Chris Schalk, Google Developer Advocate

Build OpenSocial Apps for Social Change, Win Prizes

2009-03-18T09:15:00.000-07:00

The Change the Web Challenge invites developers to create widgets and web applications that help people connect to opportunities to make a difference all over the web. It's a contest happening right now with $10,000 in prizes!

The Change the Web Challenge is being run by Social Actions - an aggregator of actions people can take to support causes, nonprofits, and progressive projects from more than forty different sites - like GlobalGiving, Change.org, DonorsChoose.org, Kiva.org, Idealist.org and VolunteerMatch. Social Actions then makes these actions available in a common format and API.

Now we’re looking to get those actions out there on the web sites, blogs and social networks we visit every day.

That's where OpenSocial comes in.

OpenSocial is the key to the social web. By enabling you to build apps that help people connect to actions on the most popular social websites like hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Netlog, Ning, orkut, and Yahoo! - you can help millions of people make a difference!

So the question we want to ask the OpenSocial community is:

What’s your dream idea for an OpenSocial app that helps people engage and interact around ways to take action?

Some ideas that might help get you started:

An app that helps you find and share (and maybe show off) actions on your favorite OpenSocial social network.
An app that enables you and your friends to compete to see who can take the most actions.
An app that displays the hottest actions on your profile for the issues you care about.

Got an idea?

Dig into the Developer Resources
Join Social Actions Developers Google Group
Check out apps already submitted to the Project Gallery

We're also hosting an online chat, OpenSocial for Social Change on Wednesday, March 25th (11am-12pm PST) with guests Dan Peterson (President, OpenSocial Foundation), Jay Parikh (Secretary, OpenSocial Foundation + Senior Vice President of Engineering at Ning) & Maxwell Newbould (Product Developer for MySpace OpenSocial) to explore and brainstorm how OpenSocial's framework and apps can help create a better world. The chat will be open to everyone to participate. Please RSVP here.

Posted by Joe Solomon, Director, Social Actions' Change the Web Challenge

Test drive data pipelining and OpenSocial templates

2009-03-03T13:49:00.000-08:00

OpenSocial v0.9 is coming right along, and we've prototyped some new features so that app developers can try them out. This stage in the iterative process is crucial to ensuring that containers are improving their OpenSocial platforms by adding the features that will make your apps more successful. Make your voice heard, and help improve the OpenSocial spec!

The first two prototypes to check out are data pipelining and OpenSocial templates. Data pipelining allows you to specify the data you want to use in your app, while templates let you describe how to render the app--all using a markup language (that's right, no JavaScript necessary!). Using data pipelining and templates will reduce the number of round trips between the container and your server, making your app render more quickly. Template values are also HTML-escaped, plugging many XSS vulnerabilities automatically.

Data Pipelining
To use data pipelining, add <Require feature="opensocial-data"> to the ModulePrefs in your gadget spec. Then you can specify the data that you want by adding request tags to a <Content> section of your gadget spec. For example, to access the viewer's friends, include a tag like this:

<script xmlns:os="http://ns.opensocial.org/2008/markup" type="text/os-data">
 <os:PeopleRequest key="friends" userId="@viewer" groupId="@friends">
</script>

Note that you set the key attribute in the os:PeopleRequest so that you can access the data returned. You can use the data to render a template (as shown below) or access the data using JavaScript like this: opensocial.data.getContext().getDataSet('friends').

OpenSocial Templates
Once you've specified the data you need, you can use a template to display it. To enable templates in your app, include the following tags in your ModulePrefs:

<Require feature="opensocial-templates">
 <Param name="process-on-server">true</param>
</Require>

Now you can add templates that define how to render social data. For example, to access the data specified above and print a list of the viewer's friends, include a template like this:

<script type="text/os-template">
  <ul>
   <li repeat="${friends}">
     <span class="name" id="id${Context.Index}">${Cur.name.givenName}</span>
   </li>
  </ul>
</script>

This example illustrates several special variables in OpenSocial templates:

repeat - iterate over the 'friends' object by adding the repeat attribute to the element.
Context.Index - an index for the object being repeated.
Cur - a reference to the current object. In this case that object is a JSON representation of a person so you can access fields directly.

These new features are currently available on the orkut sandbox, so you can try them out today. For more information (including a full example), visit the OpenSocial Templates page on the OpenSocial wiki. Once you've had a chance to check it out, please send a note to the spec list -- OpenSocial templates are designed to make app development easier, so let us know if we hit the mark.

Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, OpenSocial Team

OpenSocial Weekend Apps

2009-02-27T13:40:00.000-08:00

WeekendApps was like a codefest on overdrive organized by a grassroots team of 9 people - Sudha Jamthe, Shuchi Rana, Waleed Abdulla, Alexandros Pagidas, Van Riper, Max Marmer, Carol Tran, Jason Cooper and David Doolin. Over the course of the weekend, more than 200 designers and developers came together at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA last Friday to form teams, brainstorm new concepts for social applications, and then design and launch new social apps.

After three days, 30 pizzas, 200 sandwiches, 40 trays of Asian food, 20 boxes of junk food, 400 cups of coffee, and 10 sessions from Amazon, Sun, Google App Engine, orkut, MySpace, Yahoo!Open Strategy, we saw 14 OpenSocial apps launch on MySpace and orkut and awarded prizes to 15 developers.

The air was charged all weekend

Everyone in attendance was focused throughout the weekend, creating teams, thinking up app ideas, workout through app flow and tech hacks, deciding which containers to use, and rushing to launch by Sunday night for the grand prizes.

The event kicked off on Friday with a keynote by Kevin Marks, followed by a panel of top OpenSocial developers discussing how they monetize their apps with Offerpal. Then the fun began: teams formed, and top developers Dave Westwood, Nicholas Talarico, Ben Chow, and Randal Truong helped provide feedback on the app ideas. The process helped everyone understand what makes a successful social app, and teams bonded after learning more about the various skillsets needed to build great applications.

Saturday workshops

The next day, Shuchi loaded us with coffee and bagels (thanks to Sun and Offerpal), then Mike Culver of AWS, Fred Sauer of Google App Engine and Ravi Kota of Sun/Joyent gave workshops on hosting options.

To start building apps, there were some, like me, who translated from the Facebook world of FBML and FQL and learned OpenSocial. There were others who had to quickly decide which OpenSocial container worked best for them. Dave Westwood of BuddyPoke drove home the point that the audience on each network is different, so it is wise to plan an app with the differences between containers in mind. Max Newbould of MySpace, Jason Cooper of orkut, and Eric of Yahoo spoke about each of their OpenSocial containers, and Kevin from Offerpal helped people build virtual currency into their apps for monetization. Each workshop raised thoughtful questions on comparing platforms, containers, scalability, and many different application scenarios. We often came to consensus around tough issues and engaged everyone in the audience.

It was also great to see the community working together. Many app developers received personal guidance to overcome product hurdles with help from MySpace's Max Newbould and Google's Jason Cooper, and MySpace's team went the extra mile to make sure apps got approved by the Sunday deadline.

Photo story by Shirley X. Lin

Find more videos like this on OpenSocial.org

Awards:

MySpace is giving developers another weekend to polish their apps and is going to announce two winners on Monday, March 2nd. These winners will be featured as Editor Picks on the MySpace directory. Dave Westwood offered 500K free impressions to six apps that went live on orkut, including YumieDate, Bollywood Music, Flash Cards, Product Envy, R U Clubbin? and Buddy Quiz!. Google also selected two winners, Buddy Quiz, for best product vision, and Bollywood Music, for best implementation using the Opensocial APIs. Both received two free Google I/O passes. Finally, Sun gave a lot of cool geek toys and restaurant cards to support the developers.

See all the launched apps at OpenSocial Weekend Apps.

Posted by Sudha Jamthe, WeekendApps co-organizer

Note: This post was updated on Feb 27th, 2009 to correct the list of winners and add the last name of one of the organizers.

Gmail Labs gadgets now support OpenSocial APIs

2009-02-26T13:21:00.000-08:00

A couple months back, the Gmail team added a few Labs experiments that let you add gadgets to Gmail's left nav. One of these experiments allows you to add any gadget by URL (i.e. pasting in the URL of its XML spec file). While the UI for adding gadgets is a bit klunky, people have already started building some interesting gadgets for Gmail.

Now Gmail supports OpenSocial APIs, so you can create social gadgets that make use of Gmail contacts. Gmail's contact manager has a few different groups (see screenshot below). The OpenSocial APIs use the 'Friends' group, the same list of of friends that the iGoogle sandbox uses.

Ready to try it out? To add a gadget to the left nav of your Gmail account, follow these steps:

Go to the 'Labs' tab under Gmail Settings.
Enable the 'Add any gadget by URL' experiment and click 'Save Changes.'
Now you'll have a 'Gadgets' tab under Settings.
Enter the URL of an OpenSocial gadget spec and click 'Add'.

Try adding the OpenSocial Dev app to take Gmail's OpenSocial support for a test drive. This gadget provides OpenSocial code samples that you can execute right in Gmail, as well as a 'Data Viewer' that will help you see what information you can access about people and friends.

Like all Gmail Labs, OpenSocial support is experimental and may change, break or disappear. You can find more info about Gmail's implementation of OpenSocial on the Gmail page of the OpenSocial wiki. If you have questions, please post them in the OpenSocial Application Development forum.

Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, OpenSocial Team

OpenSocial App Developer Mentez Expanding into China

2009-02-20T11:38:00.000-08:00

2008 was a great year for OpenSocial, with dozens of social networks all over the world adopting this standard as their technology of choice for open application platforms. This has greatly expanded the reach of OpenSocial applications to over 600 million users, and social app developers stand to benefit from this global expansion.

At Mentez, our goals are to create useful apps for consumers and to help international brands extend their reach. With OpenSocial, we have learned a lot about building social apps for global audiences, especially for users in Latin America, Europe and Asia.

Late in 2008 many top Chinese social networks, namely xiaonei, 51, MySpace.cn, Tianya, and YiQi all rolled out their support for OpenSocial. We helped sponsor OpenSocial hackathons in December in Beijing and Shanghai, China. Since then we have successfully migrated some of our applications such as 好友方格 (FriendGrid), Popularity, Soccermania to xiaonei and 51.com.

Through this experience we have learned a lot about the market of Chinese social networks. For example, as app developers, it is very important to know who these users are. Xiaonei has a strong presence among university students while 51.com is especially popular with young people who frequent Internet cafes, each with over 30 million monthly active users.

A second critical stumbling block for foreign apps ported to Chinese containers is network latency. Finding local hosting can help here. We are currently on track for procuring servers inside China for large scale deployment as we execute on our goal in 2009 of reaching over 1 million users in China. Visit the OpenSocial wiki for more info on resources (e.g. hosting) about Chinese containers.

Another common issue that app developers face, especially on new social networks that support OpenSocial, is how to monetize. To this end we at Mentez bring a network of 200 developers and a strong team of business developers that let brands and their agencies integrate social channels and networks within their online strategy. Through our deep-rooted connections in advertising industry, we bring advertising dollars, especially from big brand names, to the application ecosystems on social networks, and we are looking forward to working with both social networks and app developers to enhance monetary value for the entire ecosystem.

As OpenSocial continues to take root and gains stronger adoption around the world, we look forward to many exciting opportunities in 2009 and beyond.

Posted by Juan Franco, CEO, Mentez

New social features launched on opensocial.org

2009-02-04T10:20:00.000-08:00

It seems like a no-brainer to create a social network for the OpenSocial community, so we've used Ning to add some social features to www.opensocial.org. Here are some of the cool new things you can do on the site:

Run OpenSocial apps! Since Ning supports OpenSocial, you can add apps to your profile; including useful tools like the OpenSocial Dev App or any apps you've written yourself. Use your profile to show off your work!
Chat with other developers to get help or raise issues in real time.
Learn about upcoming OpenSocial events (or run one yourself!), then share your photos or videos with the community.

Of course, opensocial.org is still the place to find OpenSocial tutorials, official specs, and other resources.

Join the community at www.opensocial.org and let us know what you think!

Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, OpenSocial Team