P@ Log

The OpenSocial summit last week was a success, with 80 developers coming, either from social sites, or developers building OpenSocial applications. Jason Costa posted a detailed wrapup on the OpenSocial API blog.
Here are a few pictures and video interviews I shot at the summit.

A few pictures of the OpenSocial Summit
And more pictures taken by my colleague Jason Costa:

OpenSocial Summit May 2008: David Glazer, Google, Intro
3 separate pieces in OpenSocial: api, reference code, all implementations, (containers and applications).
Defining the APIs is a community process, that happens in the public Google Group http://groups.google.com/group/openso…
Discussion about the specification process and governance model, IETF like, with public discusssions in the public Google Group. Openness guaranteed by the OpenSocial foundation, non profit.

OpenSocial Summit: Brandon Duncan about LinkedIn OpenSocial

They plan on opening an OpenSocial sandbox at the end of Q2, and a public launch beginning Q3.
They are selecting partners now, productivity apps, targeted verticals.
If you are interested send an email to developers@linkedin.com
Interesting LinkedIn extensions: they are offering degree of distance in the person object, which is now standardized in OpenSocial 0.8.

OpenSocial Summit: Dan Peterson about European OpenSocial

Dan Peterson gave an update about European OpenSocial containers: many of them opened an OpenSocial sandbox, or are near to ship it.

• Netlog: 30 M users through all Europe, have an OpenSocial Sandbox ready
• Hyves, 6.5 M users in the Netherlands, launched their OpenSocial sandbox today (May 15th)
• StudiVZ, Germany, 8M users, they are going to launch their sandbox soon
• Kevin Marks from Google mentions IDTail Korean social network,
  All these use Shindig for their OpenSocial container implementation.

OpenSocial Summit: Guillaume talking about Yoono

During the container updates Guillaume demoed Yoono, a sidebar extension for social interaction.

OpenSocial Summit: Guillaume and Yann from Yoono

http://www.yoono.com is a sidebar extension for your browser (IE, Firefox, Safari): access your friends from the sidebar, chart, update status, share pictures and videos.
Share and get recommendations. They have a framework in XHTML to create applications, and a server side compenent for recommendations.
They were waiting for the OpenSocial REST API to integrate OpenSocial data from other social networks in their product. In the medium term they will implement an OpenSocial container as well.
They are based in Paris and San Francisco.

OpenSocial Summit: David Glazer, Google, Conclusion

Many things go really weel. Numbers are great: 200 M users, 20k developers, 8M daily canvas views, 3 live social sites, many sandboxes.
Things that are still too hard.
Coding model is too limited and too hard. Other coding models, the RESTful API and template language will allow for new ways of creating sOpenSocial applications.
Balancing Security and User experience: Caja should help with that.
Tools: we need more tools for OpenSocial.
Writing applications that run on many containers, learn once, write anywhere. First container is a project, 2nd is a few hours, third is an hour. We should share the lore that is being developed around this.