CadCrazy
03-11-2007, 10:53 AM
Google, Inc. has released OpenSocial, a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web, for developers of social applications and for websites that want to add social features. The OpenSocial APIs give developers access to the data needed to build social applications: access to an application user's profile information, their list of friends, and the ability to share their activities with friends.
The proliferation of APIs across dozens of social websites is forcing developers to choose which ones to write applications for-- and then spend their time writing separately for each. OpenSocial gives developers of social applications a single set of APIs to learn for their applications to run on any OpenSocial-enabled website.
The common method that OpenSocial provides for writing social applications means that websites can engage a pool of third-party developers. They can direct resources that might have gone to maintaining an API and supporting its developer community to other projects.
Jeff Huber, senior vice president, engineering, Google, said, "There's a lot of innovation that will be spurred simply by creating a standard way for developers to run social applications in more places. With the input and iteration of the community, we hope OpenSocial will become a standard set of technologies for making the web social."
The sites that are supporting OpenSocial includes-- Bebo, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, mixi, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, Orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING -- represent an audience of about 200 million users globally.
Developers including Flixster, FotoFlexer, iLike, RockYou, Slide,
Theikos, and VirtualTourist have already built applications that use the OpenSocial APIs. A developer sandbox is available at http://sandbox.orkut.com so developers can go in and start testing the OpenSocial APIs. The goal is to have developers build applications in the sandbox so they can deploy on orkut and other OpenSocial sites.
Source (http://www.efytimes.com/efytimes/22482/news.htm)
The proliferation of APIs across dozens of social websites is forcing developers to choose which ones to write applications for-- and then spend their time writing separately for each. OpenSocial gives developers of social applications a single set of APIs to learn for their applications to run on any OpenSocial-enabled website.
The common method that OpenSocial provides for writing social applications means that websites can engage a pool of third-party developers. They can direct resources that might have gone to maintaining an API and supporting its developer community to other projects.
Jeff Huber, senior vice president, engineering, Google, said, "There's a lot of innovation that will be spurred simply by creating a standard way for developers to run social applications in more places. With the input and iteration of the community, we hope OpenSocial will become a standard set of technologies for making the web social."
The sites that are supporting OpenSocial includes-- Bebo, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, mixi, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, Orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING -- represent an audience of about 200 million users globally.
Developers including Flixster, FotoFlexer, iLike, RockYou, Slide,
Theikos, and VirtualTourist have already built applications that use the OpenSocial APIs. A developer sandbox is available at http://sandbox.orkut.com so developers can go in and start testing the OpenSocial APIs. The goal is to have developers build applications in the sandbox so they can deploy on orkut and other OpenSocial sites.
Source (http://www.efytimes.com/efytimes/22482/news.htm)