James Little @ NZfusion.com

The open social application space is currently buzzing - Myspace, Bebo, Facebook, Orkut, Hi5 all with their own application platforms and some level of interaction with the open social platform - if they don’t run open social, they’ll have compatible plugin applications soon.

Which provides developers in the space with a rare opportunity - building social network applications, to run only in multiple existing networks.. without their own user interface, purely webservices…. leaving Amazon web services a well positioned offering, for both startups and existing applications.

Application directories

We can’t yet launch open social applications on any platform, but they all have ’sandbox’ environments. There are a couple of places around, where open social developers can go to see what everyone else is doing - besides the official development environments of course. Update (14/3/2008): Myspace applications now in Beta.

1. OpenSocial Directory is a free resource for the OpenSocial Community, where you can search for other open social applications, or introduce your own application.
2. Orkut has not yet opened it’s application pool, but another developer has. You can search and add Open social applications to your profile - if you have a sandbox account. Except, you can’t at the moment, Orkut sandbox appears to be having some technical issues - they are possibly rolling out the release now?

Container blogs

1. Orkut blog - As we get ready for apps to go live on orkut, we’re excited to invite orkut developers to guest blog and preview their apps here.
2. Hi5 application blog
   
3. Myspace blog

Application APIs and resources

1. Opensocial API
2. How to read and write Opensocial data
3. Orkuts developer guide
4. Google gadgets development interface
5. Opensocial tutorial
6. Opensocial samples
7. Opensocial paper scissors rock

Applciation spaces

1. Orkut applications
2. Hi5 applications
3. MySpace developer zone

Open social anatomy

This helps developers understand the terminology of open social applications.

• Myspace anatomy
• Orkut anatomy

There didn’t seem to be any available on Hi5… or Bebo…

Bebo open social?

Bebo appears to be reinventing Facebook applications. The documentation on the Bebo site doesn’t indicate that bebo will be implementing open social at all. And a lot of it seems to be focused on extending the Facebook application platform.

Google wiki

Google are maintaining a wiki, largely relating to Orkut development. But it is all inter-related. The page linked shows how to use the makeRequest function, which can be used to incorporate 3rd party data applications. It also highlights issues with the function in Orkut - such as POST!

Orkut open social defects

There are remarkably few defects (24), though many more feature requests.. it must be slowly things down having this much community involvement?

Open social samples

You can check out example applications from the google svn repository - Including a container compliance test… did I mention building an open social container for your application is a good idea?

Best practises

Is a little spare of information - with only one pointer:
Link HREFs
To use links to trigger JavaScript functions, you can use this format:
<a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="javascript:callthis();">Click me to call this</a>
Do not use href=”#”! When the user clicks on the link, the IFRAME hosting your gadget will clear its security token and subsequent opensocial calls will fail.

It seems that the important piece of social applications is the ability to store data on the massive application servers used by the social networks… as described in the open social tutorial on reading and writing data.

Obviously it is possible to link in 3rd party applications - but you’ll be limiting the speed of your application, as all data will then have to be loading using AJAX functionality!

This is likely to reduce the effectiveness of using open social… as you’ll be deploying gadgets, not integrating applications! It is therefor a balance between speed and market coverage.

Yahoo joining OpenSocial??

Awesome, that provides open social applications with an un-paralleled coverage of the internet… Yahoo is the biggest contributor to web traffic - according to Alexa, followed by Google… Orkut, MySpace, Hi5, Bebo are basically the major social networks - I thought MySpace was owned by Microsoft, obviously not. What the fuck is hadoop?? It is mentioned as one of the open standards Yahoo has been following. I read the project description for Hadoop - but I still don’t understand - I think it means that it can map and reduce jobs distributing the processing in parallel across several configured nodes?

But I do understand yahoo joining OpenSocial - that would be awesome… hadoop also sounds cool…

Incentives

Google is especially excited about it’s gadget environment… and why not? Gadgets aren’t the same as open social applications - but they are very similar. Open social applications are essentially Google gadgets with an extended API and an open standards container. But I’ll presume you know this…

Google is offering $5000 to gadgets “they would like to see developed further”. To qualify, you’ll need 250,000 users a week. And a good page on what makes your gadget rock. Wow, that’s cool… $5000 is almost a months development for one person… not bad if you already bring in 250,000 users and presumably already have some sort of plan in mind.

But is $5000 enough to attract much new development? Nope, so Google are offering $100,000 cash injections in the form of seed investments. Same catch as with the $5000 grant. But you must want to develop a business model around your google gadget.

In both cases, you need to submit your application ito the gadget directory, as follow the small print… it’s not candy they are giving away. Actually, I don’t think they are technically giving… bah semantics!

I have created an open social news feed that you can follow.