OpenSocial Weekend Apps

WeekendApps was like a codefest on overdrive organized by a grassroots team of 9 people - Sudha Jamthe, Shuchi Rana, Waleed Abdulla, Alexandros Pagidas, Van Riper, Max Marmer, Carol Tran, Jason Cooper and David Doolin. Over the course of the weekend, more than 200 designers and developers came together at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA last Friday to form teams, brainstorm new concepts for social applications, and then design and launch new social apps.

After three days, 30 pizzas, 200 sandwiches, 40 trays of Asian food, 20 boxes of junk food, 400 cups of coffee, and 10 sessions from Amazon, Sun, Google App Engine, orkut, MySpace, Yahoo!Open Strategy, we saw 14 OpenSocial apps launch on MySpace and orkut and awarded prizes to 15 developers.

The air was charged all weekend

Everyone in attendance was focused throughout the weekend, creating teams, thinking up app ideas, workout through app flow and tech hacks, deciding which containers to use, and rushing to launch by Sunday night for the grand prizes.

The event kicked off on Friday with a keynote by Kevin Marks, followed by a panel of top OpenSocial developers discussing how they monetize their apps with Offerpal. Then the fun began: teams formed, and top developers Dave Westwood, Nicholas Talarico, Ben Chow, and Randal Truong helped provide feedback on the app ideas. The process helped everyone understand what makes a successful social app, and teams bonded after learning more about the various skillsets needed to build great applications.

Saturday workshops

The next day, Shuchi loaded us with coffee and bagels (thanks to Sun and Offerpal), then Mike Culver of AWS, Fred Sauer of Google App Engine and Ravi Kota of Sun/Joyent gave workshops on hosting options.

To start building apps, there were some, like me, who translated from the Facebook world of FBML and FQL and learned OpenSocial. There were others who had to quickly decide which OpenSocial container worked best for them. Dave Westwood of BuddyPoke drove home the point that the audience on each network is different, so it is wise to plan an app with the differences between containers in mind. Max Newbould of MySpace, Jason Cooper of orkut, and Eric of Yahoo spoke about each of their OpenSocial containers, and Kevin from Offerpal helped people build virtual currency into their apps for monetization. Each workshop raised thoughtful questions on comparing platforms, containers, scalability, and many different application scenarios. We often came to consensus around tough issues and engaged everyone in the audience.

It was also great to see the community working together. Many app developers received personal guidance to overcome product hurdles with help from MySpace's Max Newbould and Google's Jason Cooper, and MySpace's team went the extra mile to make sure apps got approved by the Sunday deadline.

Photo story by Shirley X. Lin

Find more videos like this on OpenSocial.org



Awards:

MySpace is giving developers another weekend to polish their apps and is going to announce two winners on Monday, March 2nd. These winners will be featured as Editor Picks on the MySpace directory. Dave Westwood offered 500K free impressions to six apps that went live on orkut, including YumieDate, Bollywood Music, Flash Cards, Product Envy, R U Clubbin? and Buddy Quiz!. Google also selected two winners, Buddy Quiz, for best product vision, and Bollywood Music, for best implementation using the Opensocial APIs. Both received two free Google I/O passes. Finally, Sun gave a lot of cool geek toys and restaurant cards to support the developers.

See all the launched apps at OpenSocial Weekend Apps.

Posted by Sudha Jamthe, WeekendApps co-organizer

Note: This post was updated on Feb 27th, 2009 to correct the list of winners and add the last name of one of the organizers.