P@ Log

Jia Chen from RockYou invited me to talk about Google OpenSocial platforms, Orkut and iGoogle during his talk at Web 2.0 Expo this morning: Building an App for Social Platforms.

It was a great sessions, with representative from hi5 and MySpace presenting their implementation of OpenSocial, and Jia and Raymond showing how to create an application that works on all networks. Here is a link to Raymond’s code sample.

OpenSocial provides a single technical specification, but policies (advertising or not) and features (extensions, which viral channels are open) may vary in each network, as well as user demography and interests, so this kind of session is very useful for application developers: right now there are 3 live OpenSocial social networks and there are already differences to know about.

Here are my slides for this talk.

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One question I get very often from container implementors is about the wire format for OpenSocial requests in Shindig: Cassie Doll documented that in the Shindig codebase recently. This is a very useful doc.

I installed Greg Slaven’s WordPress FriendFeed comments plugin today.

I had to struggle a bit to get it to work: I sent him a patch for not checking the path when you declare your blog on FriendFeed with just a / and no path.

It was a good opportunity to dig into WordPress plugin architecture: very nice.

I also changed my theme and customized it a bit.

Today at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference I gave a talk, Google Opening up to Developers: From 3 to 40 APIs in 2 years about the history of Google APIs up to yesterday (with the launch of Google App Engine).

Here are the slides:

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Google, Yahoo! and MySpace announced today the creation of the OpenSocial foundation to manage the OpenSocial specifications. The specifications will live on opensocial.org.

Many of the social sites I have been talking to in the past few months have been asking questions about the openness of the specification and its governance model: this should answer their questions. The foundation is modeled after the OpenID foundation.

Also Yahoo! is now joining OpenSocial, which is an excellent news.

I will be representing Google for the Open Silicon Valley panel about the Platformization of the Web in Palo Alto tomorrow. Here is the panel description:

In recent years, leading social networking companies have launched open platforms to third-party developers. Our Spring Quarterly Panel will feature representatives from key platform players in the Social web space. Join us and learn from industry experts about how to build your business atop social platforms such as Facebook, Yahoo!, and Google. Get first-hand insights from startup executives about using these platforms to build your applications, and accelerate user adoption. In addition pre-selected 2.0 companies will demonstrate their widgets in an Open mic session.

When: Thursday, March 13th, 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Where: SAP, 3410 Hillview Drive, Palo Alto, CA

After the success of Google Developer Days last year, we’re doing Google IO at the Moscone Center May 28 and 29.
The OpenSocial team is organizing many sessions and codelabs: this will be a good opportunity to get started with OpenSocial, or hone your skills:

• URLs Are People Too – Using the Social Graph API to Build a Social Web

Kevin Marks, Brad Fitzpatrick
Type: 101

• OpenSocial: A Standard for the Social Web

Patrick Chanezon, Kevin Marks, and Chris Schalk
Type: 101

• OpenSocial Specification: What’s Next for OpenSocial

David Glazer
Type: 201

• Apache Shindig: Make Your Social Site an OpenSocial Container

John Panzer, Dan Peterson
Type: 101

• OpenSocial across Containers

Arne Roomann-Kurrik, Lane LiaBraaten
Type: 201

• Best Practices for Spreading Your App without Ruining the User Experience

Vivian Li, Chris Schalk
Type: 201

• Building an OpenSocial Application, Focus on Client Side APIs

Arne Roomann-Kurrik, Dan Holevoet
Type: Code Lab

• Building an OpenSocial Application in the Cloud

Patrick Chanezon, Lane LiaBraaten, Jason Cooper
Type: Code Lab

• Make Your Social Site an OpenSocial Container Using Shindig

Patrick Chanezon, Kevin Marks, Chris Schalk
Type: Code Lab

• Fireside Chat: OpenSocial

OpenSocial developers
Type: Fireside Chat

At the Graphing Social Patterns conference last week, I was lucky to meet Rodney Rumford from the excellent FaceReviews blog. He asked me some very interesting questions about OpenSocial and the future of social applications.

You can find the interview on his blog, or from YouTube. I’ll expand on one of the themes we talked about (social applications as social networks, offering their own APIs) in a future blog post. After the interview we continued talking for a good hour: the GSP conference was a very good opportunity to meet new friends.