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.

Gmail Labs gadgets now support OpenSocial APIs

A couple months back, the Gmail team added a few Labs experiments that let you add gadgets to Gmail's left nav. One of these experiments allows you to add any gadget by URL (i.e. pasting in the URL of its XML spec file). While the UI for adding gadgets is a bit klunky, people have already started building some interesting gadgets for Gmail.

Now Gmail supports OpenSocial APIs, so you can create social gadgets that make use of Gmail contacts. Gmail's contact manager has a few different groups (see screenshot below). The OpenSocial APIs use the 'Friends' group, the same list of of friends that the iGoogle sandbox uses.

Ready to try it out? To add a gadget to the left nav of your Gmail account, follow these steps:

1. Go to the 'Labs' tab under Gmail Settings.
2. Enable the 'Add any gadget by URL' experiment and click 'Save Changes.'
3. Now you'll have a 'Gadgets' tab under Settings.
4. Enter the URL of an OpenSocial gadget spec and click 'Add'.

Try adding the OpenSocial Dev app to take Gmail's OpenSocial support for a test drive. This gadget provides OpenSocial code samples that you can execute right in Gmail, as well as a 'Data Viewer' that will help you see what information you can access about people and friends.

Like all Gmail Labs, OpenSocial support is experimental and may change, break or disappear. You can find more info about Gmail's implementation of OpenSocial on the Gmail page of the OpenSocial wiki. If you have questions, please post them in the OpenSocial Application Development forum.

Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, OpenSocial Team

OpenSocial App Developer Mentez Expanding into China

2008 was a great year for OpenSocial, with dozens of social networks all over the world adopting this standard as their technology of choice for open application platforms. This has greatly expanded the reach of OpenSocial applications to over 600 million users, and social app developers stand to benefit from this global expansion.

At Mentez, our goals are to create useful apps for consumers and to help international brands extend their reach. With OpenSocial, we have learned a lot about building social apps for global audiences, especially for users in Latin America, Europe and Asia.

Late in 2008 many top Chinese social networks, namely xiaonei, 51, MySpace.cn, Tianya, and YiQi all rolled out their support for OpenSocial. We helped sponsor OpenSocial hackathons in December in Beijing and Shanghai, China. Since then we have successfully migrated some of our applications such as 好友方格 (FriendGrid), Popularity, Soccermania to xiaonei and 51.com.

Through this experience we have learned a lot about the market of Chinese social networks. For example, as app developers, it is very important to know who these users are. Xiaonei has a strong presence among university students while 51.com is especially popular with young people who frequent Internet cafes, each with over 30 million monthly active users.

A second critical stumbling block for foreign apps ported to Chinese containers is network latency. Finding local hosting can help here. We are currently on track for procuring servers inside China for large scale deployment as we execute on our goal in 2009 of reaching over 1 million users in China. Visit the OpenSocial wiki for more info on resources (e.g. hosting) about Chinese containers.

Another common issue that app developers face, especially on new social networks that support OpenSocial, is how to monetize. To this end we at Mentez bring a network of 200 developers and a strong team of business developers that let brands and their agencies integrate social channels and networks within their online strategy. Through our deep-rooted connections in advertising industry, we bring advertising dollars, especially from big brand names, to the application ecosystems on social networks, and we are looking forward to working with both social networks and app developers to enhance monetary value for the entire ecosystem.

As OpenSocial continues to take root and gains stronger adoption around the world, we look forward to many exciting opportunities in 2009 and beyond.

Posted by Juan Franco, CEO, Mentez

New social features launched on opensocial.org

It seems like a no-brainer to create a social network for the OpenSocial community, so we've used Ning to add some social features to www.opensocial.org. Here are some of the cool new things you can do on the site:

• Run OpenSocial apps! Since Ning supports OpenSocial, you can add apps to your profile; including useful tools like the OpenSocial Dev App or any apps you've written yourself. Use your profile to show off your work!
• Chat with other developers to get help or raise issues in real time.
• Learn about upcoming OpenSocial events (or run one yourself!), then share your photos or videos with the community.

Of course, opensocial.org is still the place to find OpenSocial tutorials, official specs, and other resources.

Join the community at www.opensocial.org and let us know what you think!

Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, OpenSocial Team