OpenSocial Developer Interview: Jia Shen CTO from RockYou and Joe Greenstein CEO from Flixster

Posted by Patrick Chanezon, Developer Advocate

On Saturday hi5 hosted a very successful OpenSocial Hackathon on the Google campus. The hackathon also happened simultaneously in Mexico city where 60 developers attended.
More than 100 developers showed up in Mountain View, and at the end of the day 4 of them showed demos of their application running in Hi5.

Here are a few pictures from the event:

Here is a video interview recorded at the event, with Jia Shen CTO and co-founder from RockYou and Joe Greenstein CEO and co-founder from Flixster.

A few excerpts from the interview:

About the OpenSocial API

Jia: "OpenSocial has come a long way; last 2 weeks, actual social networks have gone live with API."
Joe: "The ROI for the investment in (OpenSocial) technology has been important."
Jia: "OpenSocial, just like HTML is a specification. It creates strong incentives to use Javascript, is designed with cross site scripting rules, jailed domain, canvas pages."
Joe: "I like the dynamic capabilities on user profile pages, the fact that security issues are now solved. We are very excited about the server to server api that has been proposed."

(John Panzer from Google posted a proposal for the OpenSocial REST API to the OpenSocial and Gadgets Specification public Forum 3 weeks ago; now is the good time to comment on it.)

Advice to a developer getting started creating OpenSocial application

Jia: "Start with a simple model, as a static template then work with the API to add dynamic features."
Joe: "Look at all the new things you can do, what is the user trying to do and how these technologies help."

Evolution of Social Software in the next few months

Jia: "Applications will reflect the social network personality. Looking forward to see the LinkedIn implementation."
Joe: "Biggest thing that I see happening: early version of social networks has been site centric; we will start to see apps that don't have to live in this area but will interact with your social graph directly from their sites. We'll see a comeback of destination websites."