P@ Log

This week we have 2 sessions about OpenSocial at the Graphing Social Patterns East 2008 Conference in Washington DC:

• OpenSocial + Google App Engine Technical Overview, 9:05am – 9:30am Wednesday, 06/11/2008
• OpenSocial: Open for Business, 11:15am – 12:00pm Wednesday, 06/11/2008
  

We hope to see you there!

Jason Costa took some great pictures.

A few pictures from Google I/O: it was great to meet so many old friends and make new ones.
Nelson Minar came to the conference and seemed happy about the recent developments in Google Developer products: Nelson is the one who started APIs at Google in 2003, with the Search API, then in 2005 with the AdWords API for which he recruited me.

From Google I/O 2008

Highlights: pictures of the who’s who of social networks during our Meet the Containers session.

Yesterday we had a great session at Google I/O where 12 OpenSocial containers presented their offering and answered questions: OpenSocial is really picking up steam, with 4 of them live, representing 275 million users, many sandbox environments and many planning to ship soon.
Our secret guest was Eric Staats from AOL, who announced that AOL was adopting OpenSocial: this makes me particularly happy because I used to work at AOL in 1999, when I managed the MyNetscape team.
Here are the slides for the session.

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Here are the slides for the talk Kevin Marks, Chris Schalk and myself gave this morning at Google I/O: Opensocial, a Standard for the Social Web.

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Update 5/30: I had to upload the presentation on slideshare again because it did not display correctly, so the url for it changed.

Up to last september, every time I gave a presentation about all Google APIs, I used to go to the Google Code page listing all the APIs and count the number of APIs Google offers manually.
This became difficult and last april for my Evans Data “Google, Opening up to developers” talk I came up with a script:

wget http://code.google.com/more/ -q -O | grep products-short-desc | wc -l


The page at that time was nicely marked up with a style called “products-short-desc” that I used as an unofficial microformat.
But the Google code team is working tirelessly to modernize the site and recently they switched to using Google Web Toolkit (download it, version 1.5 will soon be out with Java 1.5 support) for the site, and my script is broken. So I reached out to Jacob Moon, one of the Code engineers, and he explained that they now get the API list from a javascript file at http://code.google.com/js/codesite_product_dictionary.js.
I will now update my script to this one liner (you need to have Rhino installed)

js -e 'window=[];load("http://code.google.com/js/codesite_product_dictionary.js");print(window["CODESITE_productDictionary"].products.keys.length);'


Which tels us that we now offer 58 APIs!
Come learn more about them at Google I/O tomorrow and thursday.

For those of you who prefer the browser to the command line, you can go to http://code.google.com/more/ and paste this code in the url bar to the same effect.

javascript:{alert(CODESITE_productDictionary.products.keys.length)}


Thanks Jacob!

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.

I was in a good panel this week at the Digital Leadership Summit on Social Media: Dave McClure played the role of Facebook’s Dave Morin, Jason Shellen moderated the panel and asked me questions about future Google products as if he did not follow the same Google Speaker training as myself a few years ago (Jason left Google last year).
Neal Sample from Yahoo had some very interesting things to say about what’s missing from the platforms (OpenSocial and Facebook) from an advertising point of view.
They taped the panel, here it is:

In the past few months I recorded many videos about OpenSocial, and added videos I found interesting to a YouTube Playlist.
Today I finally took the pain to clean it up a bit and create a custom player: here you go! This is a good way to get started and learn more about the API, its history and protagonists.

After Argentina, the OpenSocial South America Tour moved to Brazil, a very social country where Orkut is very important (58% of Orkut users are in Brazil).

We gave talks in 3 universities, in Sao Paulo (Universidad Mackenzie), Campinhas (UNICAMP) and Porto Alegre (UFRGS – Campus do Vale). The talks attracted more students than in Argentina, from 40 to 150 students, and at the end of the week, Mentez, who organized an OpenSocial application contest had more than 250 teams registered.

Here are a few pictures of the tour.The picture that for me symbolizes Brazil is Roberto, a taxi driver from Rio De Janeiro who programs in C++: after our ride to Corcovado, I hope that he learns javascript and starts coding his first Orkut OpenSocial app.

Then on thursday Mentez hosted a corporate events for 120 marketing and media professionals, where we explained the potential of OpenSocial apps for brand advertising and media. Here are the slides (including some great slides from Ro Choy from RockYou, out of his Web 2.0 Expo presentation)

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I took advantage of the corporate event to record a few interviews. You can find more OpenSocial related interviews and videos on my OpenSocial YouTube Playlist.

Interview of Gaby from Oyo
Oyo is a social application to express what your favorite things are and share it with your friends so that they can help you chose.

Interview of Juan Franco from Mentez
Mentez organized the OpenSocial application contest in Brazil. They develop branded social applications for corporate customers internationally (Palm, Sony, MGM): Brazil, Mexico, Columbia, Turkey, London, and are looking to develop in Asia. They created 60 social apps already.

Interview of Roberto from Amanaie
Amanaie is a startup doing an social applications network, doing cross promotions of applications in the network.