OpenSocial
I’ve finally got around to having a look at OpenSocial, following it’s launch last year (and all the subsequent blog postings) I’ve not really heard too much about it, or who’s actually implemented it, but it seems quite a few social sites have done (though obviously not facebook): hi5, Ning, MySpace to name a few. My comments below are my first impressions from only having looked and played with the docs/examples for couple of hours, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about anything below!…
The first thing I needed to find out was what OpenSocial actually is and what it gives you (apart from the generic description that it’s an API for social web applications). My impression had been that (and I don’t know why I thought this), as well as a way to write applications (Google Gadgets) that can run in compatible social sites, OpenSocial would also help solve the problem of having multiple disparate networks of friends on different social sites, so you didn’t need to recreate your friends network when moving between different social sites. Unfortunately this doesn’t appear to be the case (please correct me here if I’m wrong!), but it does give application developers the chance to build applications for social sites which will run in multiple sites, rather than having to learn a different API each time.
The problem of friends being on different networks was one we came across when thinking about developing a Facebook application for MSG. Users would already have a set of contacts in MSG, but how to link match these up to Facebook friends. The point of having MSG in Facebook, or any other social site, would be so that you can chat directly to your friends within that network. It seems we could run up against the same problem if we created an OpenSocial MSG Gadget too.
I did find this little video about Shelfari and their OpenSocial implementation that we should be able to learn something from – though even after watching this I’m still a little confused as to how your Shelfari friends match up to your friends in Orkut :-/ . Then I got slightly distracted looking at some blog postings about Shelfaris invitation process – it appear rather similar to how Facebook used to (or still does?) automatically invite all your email contacts.
The part that I found most interesting (and also most confusing) was how you could make a social site compatible with the OpenSocial API (i.e. allow users to add applications to their profiles). It certainly seems a non-trivial task to create a site which would be compatible with the OpenSocial API – which is why in the tutorial I get pointed to a number of “container” sites which will allow me to test out my new (hello world) Gadget.
So… will be having a think now about how we can apply some of this to Cohere – and what should a Cohere Gadget embedded in a social network site actually do/look like?
