Japan's goo home social network launches OpenSocial developer sandbox

My name is Eiji Kitamura, and I am the OpenSocial architect at "goo," one of the biggest portal sites in Japan with over 43 million unique visitors per month. I'm happy to announce that we've recently launched an OpenSocial developer sandbox for the "goo home" social network site (SNS).

The new goo developer sandbox is open to anyone, and we welcome developers to start building and testing OpenSocial applications on our platform. Please be advised however, that the site is in currently only in Japanese.


Background

"goo Home" originally launched in October 2007 with the goal of making the web more social. It lets users create a profile, build relationships with friends, and share all kinds of activities through blog posts, bookmarks, locations on map, videos, pictures, restaurant reviews, etc. However, when we launched these services in 2007, the technology was proprietary. Now, they are implemented using standard OpenSocial technologies!

OpenSocial Supported Features

Here are some details of the OpenSocial API support offered by goo:

• Full support for core OpenSocial areas
• AppData
• People/Person
• Activities
• Gadget rendering support for 'home', 'profile', and 'canvas' views
• Extensive privacy controls on personal attributes. (ex: not returning attributes when set as private by user)
• Specific support for viral features:
• requestCreateActivity(with permission control)
• MediaItem supported
• requestShareApp
• requestPermission (requests one time permission for profile viewer's personal information)

Note: OpenSocial REST/RPC services are not yet supported, but we expect to support them in the near future.

In addition to general support of OpenSocial application development, we've expanded the social features in the following areas:

• Added feed import functionality for 30 external services
• Emoji (emoticon) support
• opensocial-jquery support (courtesy of Nobuhiro Nakajima)

Launch Timeline

• Developer Sandbox - Available now!
• Consumer Launch - Late April, 2009

Getting Started

All OpenSocial developers who have a basic knowledge of Japanese can get started today by registering an account at goo's developer sandbox (http://developer.home.goo.ne.jp/).

On our developer site you'll also find plenty of helpful OpenSocial technical information with detailed documentation on our OpenSocial support. (Note: all content is in Japanese.)

We hope the support of OpenSocial standards in our new platform inspires new and uniquely Japanese innovations for the evolution of the social web!

Posted by Eiji Kitamura, Architect, NTT Resonant Inc.

Netlog's first Developer Day - April 2, 2009 at Kinepolis in Brussels (Belgium)

Netlog is a fun community counting more than 40 million members all over the world. With more than 60% of our users between the ages of 14 and 24, we can also say that Netlog is the favourite place for many youths to meet online. We joined the OpenSocial initiative at the beginning of 2008, and since that time we have been improving our platform for users and developers alike. After more than a year on OpenSocial we have many stories to share.

If you'd like to learn from our team and from other developers who have been building great applications for Netlog users, here is an open invitation for you: on April 2nd we will be hosting our first Developer Day at Kinepolis in Brussels, Belgium. This is a one-day, free admission event.

We'll dedicate the morning to sharing information about our APIs, gaming platform, localization technology and monetization possibilities, and will also offer you a codelab in the afternoon.

Mark your calendar and start spreading the word! Email us at netlogday@netlog.com if you have any questions.

We'll be thrilled to have you join us. For more info, check out our blog post.

For more information about Netlog’s OpenSocial implementation go to http://en.netlog.com/go/developer/opensocial.

Update: For those interested in the codelab portion of Netlog's Developer Day, we wanted to provide some additional details. The Netlog team will be joined by members of the Google team for the afternoon codelab, and agencies such as BBDO and Thesedays will be showing how they integrated Netlog’s Brand Integration Platform into their clients’ online marketing strategies. BBDO and Thesedays will also share insights on how they succeeded in capturing the attention of Netlog's enthusiastic, young, active community.

Posted by Folke Lemaitre, VP Engineering, Netlog

Introducing the OpenSocial Development Environment

With the OpenSocial Development Environment (OSDE), you no longer need an online OpenSocial container environment to build your applications. OSDE is a new Eclipse plugin that lets you develop either OpenSocial JavaScript (gadget) client applications or OpenSocial Java client applications using OpenSocial 0.8's REST/RPC protocols, entirely within the Eclipse development environment.

OSDE is the creation of Yoichiro Tanaka, an expert software developer and leading pioneer in OpenSocial development from Japan. Yoichiro has also published a book on OpenSocial development in Japan.

Installing the OSDE plugin onto Eclipse 3.4.1 (or later) takes only minutes, and you can be up and running with a fully self-contained OpenSocial development environment. OSDE provides a complete social network environment in a single plugin, along with the necessary tools to easily manage your environment's social data. Additionally, you won't need to create multiple accounts on a social network for testing your applications. This can come in handy if you happen to feel inspired to create a new OpenSocial app while on a plane!



Architectural Highlights

OSDE is able to provide a complete, standalone development environment because it bundles the same code running on many OpenSocial containers today into a single Eclipse plug-in: for serving gadgets and OpenSocial data, Apache Shindig is bundled along with a compact Java H2 database, allowing for social data persistence. OSDE also uses Hibernate for Java Object Relational mapping of the OpenSocial data entities: people, activities, and data. Plus, OSDE bundles the OpenSocial Java client library so its wizards can quickly generate runnable Java client applications that use OpenSocial's REST/RPC protocols.

Feature Highlights

OSDE also includes development features that greatly enhance OpenSocial development:

• OpenSocial project creator wizards for both JavaScript/gadget client apps, as well as Java client applications that use the REST/RPC protocols.
• A re-entrant gadget specification editor that enables efficient editing of OpenSocial gadget properties, views, locale settings, user preferences as well as gadget and spec/JavaScript source code.
• An OpenSocial console view that shows the console output of the local Shindig/H2 social engine, as well as tabbed views for directly managing the onboard People, Activities and AppData persisted social data.
• OSDE users can use the social database console to edit their own custom social data (such as people, friend relationships, activities etc.), or they can simply load the sample social data that comes with Apache Shindig's 'Sample Container' application.
  

For more information on how to use OSDE, checkout the OSDE tutorial (which includes a screencast) and visit the OSDE homepage.

Posted by Chris Schalk, Google Developer Advocate

Build OpenSocial Apps for Social Change, Win Prizes

The Change the Web Challenge invites developers to create widgets and web applications that help people connect to opportunities to make a difference all over the web. It's a contest happening right now with $10,000 in prizes!


The Change the Web Challenge is being run by Social Actions - an aggregator of actions people can take to support causes, nonprofits, and progressive projects from more than forty different sites - like GlobalGiving, Change.org, DonorsChoose.org, Kiva.org, Idealist.org and VolunteerMatch. Social Actions then makes these actions available in a common format and API.

Now we’re looking to get those actions out there on the web sites, blogs and social networks we visit every day.

That's where OpenSocial comes in.

OpenSocial is the key to the social web. By enabling you to build apps that help people connect to actions on the most popular social websites like hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Netlog, Ning, orkut, and Yahoo! - you can help millions of people make a difference!

So the question we want to ask the OpenSocial community is:

What’s your dream idea for an OpenSocial app that helps people engage and interact around ways to take action?

Some ideas that might help get you started:

• An app that helps you find and share (and maybe show off) actions on your favorite OpenSocial social network.
• An app that enables you and your friends to compete to see who can take the most actions.
• An app that displays the hottest actions on your profile for the issues you care about.

Got an idea?

• Dig into the Developer Resources
• Join Social Actions Developers Google Group
• Check out apps already submitted to the Project Gallery

We're also hosting an online chat, OpenSocial for Social Change on Wednesday, March 25th (11am-12pm PST) with guests Dan Peterson (President, OpenSocial Foundation), Jay Parikh (Secretary, OpenSocial Foundation + Senior Vice President of Engineering at Ning) & Maxwell Newbould (Product Developer for MySpace OpenSocial) to explore and brainstorm how OpenSocial's framework and apps can help create a better world. The chat will be open to everyone to participate. Please RSVP here.

Posted by Joe Solomon, Director, Social Actions' Change the Web Challenge

Test drive data pipelining and OpenSocial templates

OpenSocial v0.9 is coming right along, and we've prototyped some new features so that app developers can try them out. This stage in the iterative process is crucial to ensuring that containers are improving their OpenSocial platforms by adding the features that will make your apps more successful. Make your voice heard, and help improve the OpenSocial spec!

The first two prototypes to check out are data pipelining and OpenSocial templates. Data pipelining allows you to specify the data you want to use in your app, while templates let you describe how to render the app--all using a markup language (that's right, no JavaScript necessary!). Using data pipelining and templates will reduce the number of round trips between the container and your server, making your app render more quickly. Template values are also HTML-escaped, plugging many XSS vulnerabilities automatically.

Data Pipelining
To use data pipelining, add <Require feature="opensocial-data"> to the ModulePrefs in your gadget spec. Then you can specify the data that you want by adding request tags to a <Content> section of your gadget spec. For example, to access the viewer's friends, include a tag like this:

<script xmlns:os="http://ns.opensocial.org/2008/markup" type="text/os-data">
 <os:PeopleRequest key="friends" userId="@viewer" groupId="@friends">
</script>

Note that you set the key attribute in the os:PeopleRequest so that you can access the data returned. You can use the data to render a template (as shown below) or access the data using JavaScript like this: opensocial.data.getContext().getDataSet('friends').

OpenSocial Templates
Once you've specified the data you need, you can use a template to display it. To enable templates in your app, include the following tags in your ModulePrefs:

<Require feature="opensocial-templates">
 <Param name="process-on-server">true</param>
</Require>

Now you can add templates that define how to render social data. For example, to access the data specified above and print a list of the viewer's friends, include a template like this:

<script type="text/os-template">
  <ul>
   <li repeat="${friends}">
     <span class="name" id="id${Context.Index}">${Cur.name.givenName}</span>
   </li>
  </ul>
</script>

This example illustrates several special variables in OpenSocial templates:

• repeat - iterate over the 'friends' object by adding the repeat attribute to the element.
• Context.Index - an index for the object being repeated.
• Cur - a reference to the current object. In this case that object is a JSON representation of a person so you can access fields directly.

These new features are currently available on the orkut sandbox, so you can try them out today. For more information (including a full example), visit the OpenSocial Templates page on the OpenSocial wiki. Once you've had a chance to check it out, please send a note to the spec list -- OpenSocial templates are designed to make app development easier, so let us know if we hit the mark.

Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, OpenSocial Team