Jonathan Terleski, User Experience Team
Whether you're an applications developer or a container developer, OpenSocial enables you to create new and innovative experiences for your users. Today, I'd like to show you one of the ways we've been thinking about the user experience of a container like orkut.
You've probably noticed that with many social platforms, you need to install an application before using it. This can involve making decisions about sharing information with the app, the app posting activities on your behalf, and the app having real-estate on your profile. Often, this happens before you've even had a chance to use the application.
In this video, we've imagined a different kind of container: one that lets users interact with applications without installing them. This allows users to make educated decisions about what their applications can access and how their applications will behave. The lower the barrier to using an application, the more applications people will try. The more applications people try, the more likely they are to find something they truly enjoy. And when someone truly enjoys an application and does invite his/her friends, that invitation will carry with it extraordinary value and significance for users and developers alike.
Again, this is just a mock-up of what a few applications running in orkut could look like:
For a higher-quality, but larger version, click here.
To that end, you'll notice there are a number of functions in the OpenSocial API starting with "request" (e.g. requestShareApp, requestSendMessage). These functions define an agreement between the applications developer and the host container that allows the container to optionally prompt the user for more input, or simply deny the request. While each container will be able to define its own policy, we encourage apps developers and containers to take advantage of these functions to create an "install-free" user experience.
Social platforms are quickly evolving, and what we've shown you here today isn't necessarily what you'll see in orkut tomorrow. It's a look at a few of the things we're thinking about here at the Googleplex. I'm excited to hear your feedback and thoughts on the discussion board.
6 comments:
Glad to see the different user x-perience through opensocial. Just perplexed with the fact the most of the features shown in the demo isnt available to the developer community. By features I see the demos use request share App etc.
One thing thats confusing is that the demo kinda violates some of the basic things like the App can access the viewers information only if the app is installed else by no means the app can access the viewers information [dont be evil :) ]any take on this.
This would be a much nicer way to spread applications, and improve overall user experience. At the hackathon in February, we counted it out, and it took somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 clicks and three pages to add an app, and that was if you knew exactly where to click.
i am not sure if this new approach brings that in, too but in addition to rating apps, being able to filter the app invites one receive based on these ratings would be great. that would avoid the mess one can observe at facebook apps.
'five of his friends already have photoboard', is this a direct api call, or does the app get info of friends even before the person has given any permissions?
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