Sonico has launched its OpenSocial Container!

I am pleased to announce that Sonico, one of Latin America's leading social networks, has successfully rolled out its OpenSocial container to over +39 million users! A fantastic group of launch partners, including Buddypoke and GameDesire, worked with us for this initial release! Sonico is one of the leading social networks in Latin America, and is positioned as the second largest social network in Brazil. It is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Sonico's OpenSocial (v 0.8) platform includes the following:

• Full support for the core Opensocial APIs:
• AppData
• People/Person
• Activities


• Gadget rendering of home, profile, preview and canvas views
• Dimensions for views are the same as used by Orkut


• Viral features:
• requestCreateActivity
• requestShareApp
• requestSendMessage


• RESTful APIs
  
• RESTful and RPC protocols
• 2-legged Oauth

Test & Publish your apps!

Our goal is to extend our application offering with useful and entertaining applications which bring value to our community and improve their experience!

We’re happy to invite the OpenSocial developer community to our sandbox and encourage the submission of engaging apps! It is a great opportunity to tap into a market that is eager for social applications.

Request sandbox access and read about our OpenSocial implementation:

http://sandbox.sonico.com

To learn about Sonico's RESTful API visit:

http://api.sonico.com

To learn more about Sonico's demographics and growth:

http://www.slideshare.net/sonico/sonico-corporate-en

Background

Sonico is a social communication platform launched in July 2007 that merges social utility and entertainment to organize people’s life online. Developed with a strong emphasis in user legitimacy, privacy and personalization, it has been widely adopted across Latin America. Sonico is positioned as the second largest social network in Brazil, and is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Located in Buenos Aires and with a team over 80 people, Sonico was elected by BusinessWeek as the 5th tech startup with the highest global growth potential. Sonico closed its first round of capitalization of USD 4.3 million in May 2008.

For more information: http://corporate.sonico.com/

Posted by Alvaro Teijeiro
Partner & CIO, Sonico.com

Social apps for your virtual self

Avatars United is pleased to announce the launch of the Avatars United Developer Platform and its OpenSocial container! The Developer Platform was initially made available to selected developers two months ago, but is now open to everyone.

Background
Avatars United is a social network for virtual world avatars launched in early 2008. The site was built in recognition of the fact that strong bonds and close friendships exist within virtual spaces. Users can register multiple avatars and connect with their virtual friends or gather in groups to discuss and plan in-game events. Avatars United also offers a virtual currency, which can be used to customize avatar and group profiles, and purchase virtual items. Currently, 80 of the most popular online games and virtual worlds are supported, including World of Warcraft, EVE Online and Second Life.

The Avatars United Developer Platform is part of Avatars United’s vision to allow each user to select and install applications that suit his or her particular character development targets in his or her particular virtual world setting. The platform supports applications for both avatars and groups. This in combination with game-specific APIs allows for some truly innovative social applications that could help enhance the gaming experience in the same way as game add-ons already have proven to do. Check out WoW Armory or the newly launched EVE Achievements for some examples.

Features
Avatars United's OpenSocial container includes the following:

• Full support for core OpenSocial 0.8.1 JavaScript APIs
• OpenSocial 0.8.1 JSON-RPC Protocol
• Gadget views: profile, canvas, home, preview, group profile and group canvas
• Preview support for OpenSocial 0.9 Albums API
• OpenSocial extensions for Groups and Worlds, allowing access to information about groups, group members and the worlds (i.e. games) and realms (i.e. game servers) supported on Avatars United

The following features are currently not supported:

• opensocial.requestShareApp
• OpenSocial RESTful protocol
• Proxied requests using 3-legged OAuth (i.e. gadgets.io.AuthorizationType.OAUTH)
• 3-legged OAuth for the OpenSocial RPC protocol

To learn more about the Avatars United Developer Platform please visit the developer website.

Development Contest
As part of our launch, we are organizing an EVE Online application development contest in cooperation with CCP Games. Develop an application for EVE Online and have the chance to win cool prizes, including cash, cloud services credits, computer gear and special EVE Online prizes! Check out the contest page for more information.

Posted by Jacob Gyllenstierna, Product Manager, Avatars United Developer Platform

Japan's mixi adds mobile support with its OpenSocial RESTful API

Hello, my name is Hidetaka Yamashita, and I am in charge of mixi's OpenSocial Mobile project. I am very happy to announce that mixi has recently added support for mobile phones to our OpenSocial platform. mixi.jp is currently the most popular Japanese social networking service (SNS) and has more than 17 million registered users. You may have heard about our recently launched OpenSocial developer sandbox in April. With this announcement, we are introducing our "mixi apps for mobile" platform which is based on OpenSocial's RESTful API using 2-legged OAuth.

Background

In Japan most people use 3G mobile phones that connect to the Internet at max 7.2Mbps. Currently, more people access the web through mobile phones than through PCs. In mixi's case, access from PCs is approximately 30% compared to mobile phone access, which is 70%. Therefore, it is crucial for mixi to offer mobile phone support for OpenSocial applications.

How mixi's mobile platform works

mixi's mobile development platform is targeted for non-native mobile development, where third party developers build mobile social apps on their own application servers. However, when accessing the application from a mobile phone, users still point their phones to the main mixi site as it serves mainly as a proxy to the third party site. As the response returns from the third party site, the mixi Application Proxy processes the response (which is purely content) and merges it into a complete XHTML response (by adding a header and footer). It is then passed back to the requesting mobile phone. Since the core application itself resides on a third party site, developers build their apps using the RESTful API with 2-legged OAuth to securely access social data from mixi.

With mixi's RESTful API with 2-legged OAuth, OpenSocial applications can run anytime, anywhere!

Supported Features

API (requires authentication using 2-legged OAuth). You can access all the core OpenSocial APIs, as well as photos and communities on mixi.

Timeline (for mobile)

• Closed beta version - Ongoing now
• Consumer launch - September 2009
• Official ads program - September 2009
• Virtual currency and Payment API - October 2009

To learn more about mixi's new OpenSocial mobile platform please visit: http://developer.mixi.co.jp/. (Note: this site is in Japanese.)

Posted by Hidetaka Yamashita, mixi, Inc.

Apache Shindig 1.0-incubating released

Apache Shindig aims to make it simple to create your own OpenSocial container by providing an open source implementation (in both Java and PHP) of the OpenSocial APIs. The Shindig team recently made creating and maintaining an OpenSocial container even easier, by publishing a release that supports OpenSocial v0.8.1.

Now, instead of checking out a specific revision or trying to keep up with the ever-changing trunk, OpenSocial container developers can use stable releases in their own websites. As issues come up, the Shindig community will fix them and roll them into the stable release, so developers will just need to grab the new version.

The Apache Shindig 1.0-incubating release is available on the downloads page of the Shindig website. If you've been running an older revision or branch, now's the time to update to known-good state. Of course, the Shindig folks have been busy, so if you're interested in new features, like templates and the streamlined JavaScript API, you can get all the OpenSocial v0.9 features by checking out the source -- and a stable release supporting OpenSocial v0.9 is already in the works!


Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, on behalf of the Apache Shindig Team