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OpenSocial continues to grow: Welcome, Yahoo!
March 25, 2008
Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager
Last November,
OpenSocial was created
to help build infrastructure for the social web. OpenSocial provides a common mechanism for developers to easily hook into many different social networks and extend their functionality. Sites including MySpace and orkut have begun to provide OpenSocial applications to their users, and hi5 will be rolling out next week.
Today we're pleased that
Yahoo! has announced its support for OpenSocial
. We're looking forward to having Yahoo! users join the hundreds of millions of people who will soon enjoy OpenSocial applications. This addition means even more distribution for developers, encourages participation by even more websites, and, most importantly, results in more features for users all across the web.
In addition, Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google are joining with the broader community to create a non-profit foundation to foster the continued open development of OpenSocial. To that end, we've also launched
OpenSocial.org
, designed to become the main documentation hub and primary source of information about OpenSocial. To learn more, and to get involved, please review the
foundation proposal
.
With that, welcome, Yahoo! We look forward to growing the social web together.
orkut going more social
February 11, 2008
Posted by Amar Gandhi, orkut Group Product Manager
Starting this month, we're enabling developers to make their social applications available to orkut users. We'll start ramping up to more than 50 million people over the next few weeks.
To prepare for this growth, we're now accepting social applications. For a while now, developers have been able to write, test, and play with applications on orkut. Later this month, however, we're going to start rolling them out to orkut users. OpenSocial developers can
submit
their completed applications (deadline: Feb. 15).
To help developers ready their applications, we're offering engineering support and training. We've scheduled
orkut hackathons
on Feb. 14-15 from 10 am-6 pm at the Googleplex in Mountain View and via videoconference in New York. For more information or to RSVP, please email
hackathon.rsvp@gmail.com
. If you can't attend, we hope to see you in the
OpenSocial forums
or on chat (irc://irc.freenode.net/opensocial).
OpenSocial makes the web better
November 2, 2007
Posted by Joe Kraus, Director of Product Management
As the web goes, so goes Google, and that's why we care about making the web better. Five months ago,
we launched Google Gears
to make the web better by making it work offline. Now, we want to make the web better by making it more social.
A tremendous amount of activity is occurring on social networks these days. Hundreds of millions of people share photos, rate movies, and throw virtual sheep at one another. All these social networks are looking to give their communities more and more things to do -- and they realize they can't do it on their own. They need to open up and become platforms for developers to extend. So, many social networks have looked at, or launched, their own APIs that typically do the same kinds of things: give access to user profiles and friend networks, and allow an application to post activities so that everyone's circle of friends knows what the others are doing. All of this has been good news, because developers could get their applications onto a social network.
But there's a problem: it wasn't one or two social networks doing this, but ten or fifteen. Now, to get on all the social networks a developer has had to customize their application for each one. When your "development team" is just one or two people, the proliferation of APIs forces you to make tough choices, because you can't do that much one-off work. Not only is this situation bad for developers, it's bad for consumers too: When developers can't afford to do the work to make their applications work on a certain social network, the people using those networks lose out.
That's why today we're excited to introduce
OpenSocial
, a set of common APIs that make it easy to create and host social applications on the web. OpenSocial allows developers to write an application once that will run anywhere that supports the OpenSocial APIs.
It's good for developers because it makes it easier for them to focus on making their web apps better; they get lots of distribution with a lot less work. It's good for websites, because they can tap into the creativity of the largest possible developer community (and no longer have to compete with one another for developer attention). And finally, it's good for users, because they get more applications in more places. Global members of the OpenSocial community include
MySpace
,
Engage.com
,
Friendster
,
hi5
,
Hyves
,
imeem
,
LinkedIn
,
Ning
,
Oracle
,
orkut,
Plaxo
,
Salesforce.com
,
Six Apart
,
Tianji
,
Viadeo
, and
XING
.
We were thrilled to see
so many partners turn out
for our very first CampFire One event, a small gathering of developers at the Googleplex. They do the best job of explaining why they support this vision of an open, programmable web. And so in the spirit of being social, we want to share the video from tonight's event.
SMS on orkut
January 29, 2007
Posted by Pedram Keyani, Software Engineer
While
orkut
users love having an online social network, we understand that a good deal of your social life happens offline. We wanted orkut to enrich the offline social life of its members, so we thought we could either give you computers with really long cords or we could bring orkut to the device you carry around in your pocket: the mobile phone. Thus the idea for an orkut SMS service was born.
With orkut's new SMS feature, you can
scrap
your friends, look up their contact information and receive scrap notifications. Now you can send scraps from the bus, bar or bathroom, and your friends can get notified of those scraps when on bicycle, beach or bed. Along with the standard orkut features, we've included a few hidden goodies for the adventurous to find.
This week, orkut SMS will become available to orkut members in Brazil who use Claro as their mobile service provider. When the feature becomes available to you, a message will be displayed when you sign in to your account. We hope to expand soon to other mobile service providers in Brazil and around the globe.
So next time you want to scrap your friend Sergio about a party, just text message orkut with "scrap Sergio it's party time man!"
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