The Project SocialSite Blog: Social Networking, software, trends and more

OpenSocial's 1st birthday bash was last week and it sounds like it went very well. I wish I could have been there. Google's Dan Peterson posted a nice summary of the event, with pictures, slides, videos of the presentations and some great adoption numbers for the up-and-coming Social Networking standard:

• More than 315 million app installs
• More than 85 million daily canvas page views
• More than 7,500 applications
• More than 20 live containers

Pretty impressive, especially considering OpenSocial is not even version 1.0 yet. Here's a chart that shows adoption over the past year, and some well deserved party favors:

With SocialSite, we hope to add to those numbers. Stay tuned...

After the big announcement last week and the blog-silence this week, you might we wonder if we're still around. Well, we are and we're as busy as can be. We're working away on automatic profile creation, better theme support, new gadget directory and a couple of new efforts that we're not ready to talk about yet.

And, we haven't been totally silent this week either. You just have to know where to look. Just the other day I blogged the details of the SocialSite relationship model on my person blog, and explained how you can configure SocialSite to behave like various popular Social Networking services.

Work on the next revision of the OpenSocial spec is underway the proposed schedule is below. You've got until tomorrow to get your ideas in.

Proposed Timeline:

• Topic ideas due 11/7
• Proposals & technical discussions end 11/21
• Draft created by 12/4
• Full draft review from 12/5 to 12/12
• Final publication 12/15

If you're insterested, then check out the 0.9 Proposals Spreadsheet that lists the proposals slated for discussion. And get involved in the OpenSocial and Gadgets Specification Discussion in the OpenSocial Group. Here on the SocialSite team we're working on getting two additions in: Bobby's Messaging changes and adding Paging Support for Activities.

Here are links to the discussion threads for the proposals we've made for OpenSocial v0.9 (you may need to join the group before you view these):

• Proposal: Messaging API changes
• Proposal: Activity Paging

More OpenSocial adoption news today: LinkedIn has also launched OpenSocial support with a Application Directory of nine applications including TripIp, Huddle, Wordpress and Slideshare. Here's what TechCrunch has to say about it:

Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch: LinkedIn has launched its new OpenSocial-based application platform called InApps - an answer to the platforms found on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, but without the clutter and “junk” apps that plague those sites. Unlike most other social networks, LinkedIn apps must go through an approval process before they will go live on the store, and all apps must be deemed “professional” in purpose to appear on the business-oriented social network. [Read on for application mini-reviews and more...]

And by the way, we're building Gadget white-listing into Project SocialSite, so you can implement the same sort of Gadget approval process for a SocialSite powered Social Network.

Yahoo announced the Yahoo Application Platform this week (that's a mini-screenshot of the app editor on the right) and, as we've been saying in our SocialSite briefings and presentations, "social is part of the platform." Yahoo is providing multiple social APIs including OpenSocial. Here's the OpenSocial support announcement on the OpenSocial API blog:

Sam Pullara, Vice President, Yahoo! Application Platform: "This is just the beginning for YAP and OpenSocial. As a founding member of the OpenSocial Foundation, Yahoo! is committed to supporting the complete OpenSocial specification and is working with the community to expand the specification to include OSML and OpenSocial templates. In addition, we are currently implementing a Shindig-based OpenSocial container which will allow us to provide full support for the OpenSocial REST Protocols and thus for Portable Contacts."

We're always glad to hear about OpenSocial adoption, the more live containers and apps the better from the SocialSite point of view. The same goes for Shindig.

Sam Pullara also mentions working with the community on OSML and OpenSocial templates and that's good news too. I've been working with templates for a couple of weeks now, using the implementation that's part of Shindig but not yet part of the OpenSocial spec. They're a vast improvement over the way we write gadgets now, from both productivity and maintainability points of view.

Related links:

• Yahoo! Open Strategy 1.0 includes OpenSocial and other social APIs
• OpenSocial Template spec latest, August 2008
• OpenSocial Templates Demo Nice demo and developer docs for OpenSocial templates

So says Roy Fielding, the author of the paper that defined REpresentational State Transfer (REST). And the same goes for the OpenSocial REST API, which is the basis for the SocialSite REST APIs. Here's part of his comment about OpenSocial:

Roy Fielding: The OpenSocial RESTful protocol is not RESTful. It could be made so with some relatively small changes, but right now it is just wrapping RPC results in common Web media types.

There are lots of advantages to being RESTful and we certainly want both the OpenSocial and the SocialSite REST APIs to live up to their names, so I'm glad to hear the changes are "relatively small." Now we just need to figure out what those changes are. I asked Roy to elaborate and I also started a thread (Google Groups login required) on the topic in the OpenSocial spec discussion group.

Dan Petersen, OpenSocial API blog: Hard to believe, but OpenSocial is just a few weeks shy of being a full year old! To celebrate, we're getting together to look back on the great progress we've all made in the past year and to discuss where we should take OpenSocial next. And of course, we'll eat birthday cake!

In addition to cake the event (details here) will include updates from developers, spec discussions and opportunities for hacking. The event will be held at 10AM on Thursday, November 13, 2008 at the MySpace office in San Francisco, CA. I can't make it myself, but hopefully some of the SocialSite team can attend.

Today, I've got another post in my series on SocialSite's OpenSocial extensions. The article is titled SocialSite's OpenSocial extensions, part 2: Web Services (continued) and it covers the new Web Services APIs we've added for Gadget management, Messages and Search.

As you may already know, to enable full read/write access to the Social Graph for the Project SocialSite Widgets and Web Services, we're extending the standard OpenSocial APIs. This week, I've started a series of blog posts to describe the extensions we are making. Part 1 covers SocialSite's OpenSocial extensions: Web Services.

Do you have input to improve OpenSocial? If so, you're in luck. Dan Peterson sent out a call to start the ball rolling on the OpenSocial v0.9 Specification. For newbies he discusses the specification process. He also gives a recap of likely changes in v0.9.

He's looking to gather all ideas by this Friday (October 10th). So if you've been itching for a feature, now is the time to send your ideas in!

Want to invite your email contacts to join you on your favorite social networking site? You probably can. Want to do so without having to give your email account username and password to the social networking site? Your odds drop a bit. Want to do it all in a standardized way? Your odds drop to zero. But that could change, if the guys behind the Portable Contacts effort have their way. They're trying to provide a standardized and secure way for users to share address book data across different sites.

The specification is still at the draft stage. But, as Dare Obasanjo describes, there is already a lot to like about its approach (particularly the alignment with OAuth and OpenSocial). So while it's too early for a social networking server like Project SocialSite to directly leverage this work, we'll certainly be keeping an eye on it.

Want to understand where OpenSocial is today and where it's heading tomorrow? Then read Joe Farber's interview with Joe Kraus (a Director of Product Management at Google who focuses on social networking and OpenSocial). They talk about the reach of current OpenSocial deployments (over 300 million users, as we've reported before), what's coming next with OpenSocial 0.8 (an emphasis on the RESTful Data APIs), and what's further down the road in the 0.9 plans (OpenSocial Templates, for one thing).

As we said last week, OpenSocial is the heart of Project SocialSite. So it's nice to see that it's getting plenty of attention.

As pointed out earlier in this blog, OpenSocial spec version 0.8.1 has been reviewed and is ready for implementation. So what's next? Already there has been some discussions on what should be there in OpenSocial spec version 0.9. One of the cool things is the proposal on templates. Checkout this link for more information. This is great news for us working on Project SocialSite since it makes development of our gadgets so easy :)

The OpenSocial Foundation announced today that it's open to new members, and is looking to fill two community board seats. Check out today's blog for more information on the foundation and how to join.

Last month (is it September already?), Ana described some of the steps that were involved in migrating OpenSocial gadgets from version 0.7 to 0.8. This time, she dives deeper and walks through all the changes needed to migrate the SocialSite activities gadget.