RenRen Launches OpenSocial 0.9 Support

As one of the leading social networking sites in China, renren has always been a close partner of OpenSocial, following all the product and technology progress of OpenSocial. After one month of intensive development and testing, the renren Open Platform formally announced the support for OpenSocial 0.9.

This OpenSocial upgrade on Renren consists of the following progress:

• Full support of all the features of OpenSocial v0.9
• A more friendly payment interface
• Support for the RESTful API of OpenSocial
• More useful info on the wiki

After one year’s growth, over 2,000 third party applications have been launched on the renren Open Platform. A batch of top applications have acquired millions of users. In order to build a healthy and open environment for the developers to unleash their talents and realize the entrepreneurship, the renren Open Platform keeps improving the functionality and efficiency of its own API, and firmly chose OpenSocial as a open API standard.

OpenSocial helps developers to reduce the cost of development and implement features effectively. Especially for the overseas developers, it is quite easy for them to transplant the hot oversea OpenSocial-supported applications to China. The Renren Open platform has benefited a lot from OpenSocial.

With innovation and openness, the Renren Open Platform will continue the partnership with OpenSocial, together with global developers, and drive the new Open Era of China internet.

Bo Li, Fusong Li and Jing Huang, renren.com

"Enterprise OpenSocial White paper" now available!

OpenSocial emerged from the demands of consumer-facing social networking sites, including MySpace, LinkedIn, and Ning. The rise of online social networking, and the changing nature of the consumer web, have both made OpenSocial increasingly relevant to business and enterprises. Beyond social capabilities for accessing and sharing user profile, relationship and activity data, OpenSocial can also be used as a general purpose web application integration technology, providing open standards for browser-based components known as gadgets. For non-browser/ui data transfer OpenSocial also includes a REST based server-to-server protocol

Over the last few months, a small group of enterprise vendors have been working together to understand how each is using OpenSocial within their organizations, and identify requirements based upon their enterprise use cases. What started out as a panel session at Google IO in May of 2009, led to larger face to face meeting in September consisting of representatives from IBM, SAP, Atlassian, Alfresco, SocialText, Cisco, Cubetree, eXo Platform, Google and others. The result of that face to face meeting is the Enterprise OpenSocial white paper, a collaborative effort that discusses general requirements for enterprise social systems and describes how OpenSocial can be used today to address them. Not all requirements are met today, however, so the paper also outlines the current gaps and discusses how the specification might evolve to meet them.

The white paper is intended for IT professionals, development managers, and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) who are leading organizational changes through social computing by embracing standards and Web 2.0 approaches. Our next face to face meeting is in late January 2010, so check out the Enterprise OpenSocial page on OpenSocial.org for more details. We hope that you find the paper enjoyable and educational. However, we recognize this is only the first step. Like the paper, we'll conclude with a call to action and encourage you to become involved and help shape OpenSocial.

Click here to read the "Enterprise OpenSocial White paper"!


Posted on behalf of the Enterprise OpenSocial team by Mark Weitzel (IBM) and Chris Schalk (Google)

Collaborate around OpenSocial gadget content using Atlassian Confluence

Hello Readers, Mark Halvorson from Atlassian posting.  A while back Atlassian announced its commitment to bringing OpenSocial to the Enterprise, since that time we've been working hard to get OpenSocial working in all of our products.  In October we released JIRA 4.0, Atlassian's award-winning issue tracker.  With JIRA 4.0's new Shindig-based dashboards, JIRA acts as both an OpenSocial gadget producer and consumer.  Now we're happy to announce that Confluence 3.1 is now generally available for download from atlassian.com - and it too can now both produce and consume OpenSocial gadgets!

As many of you know OpenSocial gadgets make it easier to integrate with other applications on the web and behind the firewall.  Along with many other new features it is now possible to embed OpenSocial gadgets on any Confluence wiki page.  This will let groups of people collaborate around gadget content from virtually any application seamlessly.

• Embedding OpenSocial Gadgets is Easy - Confluence 3.1 lets you embed Gadgets from other Atlassian tools like JIRA, Bamboo and FishEye directly into Confluence pages. You can add and configure gadgets in just a couple clicks using the Macro Browser, a visual editor available from any page:
  
  And because OpenSocial is an open standard, you can use Gadgets to integrate with 3rd party applications behind the firewall and thousands of applications on the web.
  


• Add Confluence to other applications - Confluence also provides its own Gadgets that you can embed into other OpenSocial containers like JIRA or even Gmail. Confluence comes with three out-of-the-box gadgets: Activity Stream, QuickNav and Confluence News.
  
  

See for yourself
Check out our brief overview video to see all of Confluence 3.1's new features in action:



Try it now!
Download Confluence 3.1 now to upgrade or get started a 10-user license for only $10, or a free 30-day evaluation. We've introduced simplified evaluation installers for Windows and OS X to get you up and running quickly.

If you need instant gratification, you can also check out our Online Trial (also free for 30 days) or play around with our live Sandbox.

Check out 3.1 and let us know what you think!

Posted by Mark Halvorson, Atlassian Software

MySpace Beta Launches OpenSocial 0.9 OSML and Data Pipelining

MySpace is announcing the public beta of OpenSocial 0.9 with OSML and Data Pipelining.

For off-site developers and API-based apps, we've had OpenSocial 0.9 REST APIs available for a few months, go check it out. This beta launch represents the second half of an exciting and feature-packed release of OpenSocial on the MySpace Developer platform.

"What does OpenSocial 0.9 do for me on MySpace?" you might ask. There are lots of great things:

* A simple tag-based syntax for accessing data (Data Pipelining).
* A powerful template system for defining reusable content as "custom tags" for server-side or client-side rendering (OSML).
* A rich expression language for accessing data (OpenSocial Expression Language - or OS EL).
* Improved Gadget XML support for writing cross-container apps.
* Internationalization support with message bundles.
* Faster renderings performance

Now, instead of writing 30+ lines of JavaScript code with requests and callback handlers to get a list of friends, one Data Pipeline tag can retrieve this data:

<os:PeopleRequest key="myFriends" userId="@viewer" groupId="@friends" />

If your app needs to display and format data and UI components, it can be done with OSML markup instead of JavaScript. To define a tag "myapp:PersonBlock" showing a person's name and image in a box, use the following markup.

<script type="text/os-template" tag="myapp:PersonBlock">
<div style="border:3px solid green;">
<img src="${My.person.thumbnailUrl}" />
${My.person.displayName}
</div>
</script>

Any data declared with Data Pipeline tags can be easily accessed via the OpenSocial Expression Language (OS EL) within your app. The code to show the name of the first friend in the friend list registered under the key "myFriends" is as simple as this:

The first friend's name is: ${myFriends[0].displayName}

Improved Gadget XML support means your app's source code can be managed with a single code file. Porting between other OpenSocial containers will be greatly simplified. We're also exposing REST APIs for app management. You'll be able to wire in your favorite code editing tools for app management.

As part of the improved Gadget XML support and the new OS EL, you can easily internationalize and localize your app to be used in different cultures. The text of your app can be defined in different message bundles and accessed via OS-EL statements. A "Hello World" app supporting English and Spanish would contain code as below:

<Locale>
<messagebundle>
<msg name="greeting">Hello World</msg>
</messagebundle>
</Locale>

<Locale lang="es">
<messagebundle>
<msg name="greeting">Hola Mundo</msg>
</messagebundle>
</Locale>
...

${Msg.greeting}


Over the next few weeks we'll be diving into the features of 0.9 in more depth, adding tutorials, and building sample apps to get you up and running, so stay tuned. There will be a number of tutorials on creating OSML apps linked to from the OpenSocial Version 0.9 Wiki Page. For now, you can create a friends list app as follows:
1. Go to the developer site, sign in, and create a new On-site app named "My Friends".
2. On the Upload App XML page, scroll down and click the (Beta) App Gadget Source Editor button
3. Click the Install button on the gadget editor screen to install the app you've just created.
4. Insert the below code in the source text box and save:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<Module xmlns:os="http://ns.opensocial.org/2008/markup" >
<ModulePrefs title="Friends need Hello also" description="This is the desc">
<Require feature="opensocial-0.9"/>
<Require feature="opensocial-templates"/>
<Require feature="opensocial-data"/>
</ModulePrefs>
<Content type="html" view="canvas">

<script type="text/os-data">
<os:ViewerRequest key='vwr' />
<os:PeopleRequest key='friends' userId="@viewer" groupid="@friends" />
</script>

<script type="text/os-template">
<h1>Hello world, ${vwr.displayName}</h1>
Your friends are:
<div>
<os:Repeat expression="${friends}">
<p>
Friend number ${Context.index} is: ${Cur.displayName}
<img src="${Cur.thumbnailUrl}" />
</p>
</os:Repeat>
</div>
</script>

</Content>
</Module>

Happy coding!

studiVZ, meinVZ and schuelerVZ launches OpenSocial support

Our three platforms studiVZ, meinVZ and schuelerVZ are Germany's largest social network with close to 16 million users.

We are proud to announce that our platform has OpenSocial 0.8.1 up and running. Developers can upload and test their Apps against our platforms and request the approval to make them available to our users.

All interested developers are invited to visit our developer's wiki at http://developer.studivz.net/wiki, where more information can be found on how to become a VZ OpenSocial App developer. Following the strict German privacy regulations, we introduced a new concept called VCards, which enable users to determine which of their profile information they are willing to share with each of their installed Apps, this can be App-specific if they wish.

Services

Currently we offer the following OpenSocial services:

• People
• AppData

The next release will continue implementations of the following services

• Messages
• Activities
  
• Payment (Scheduled for a Q1 2010 launch)
  

All services are also available in our REST API over two-legged or three-legged OAuth.

Views

• Profile
• Canvas
• Group (VZ only)
  
• Preview (VZ only)
  
• Popup (VZ only)
• Integration (VZ only)
  

Extensions

Beside the standard extensions we implemented some additional functionality in order to meet our platform's needs and to enhance the user-experience:

• vz.invite
• Extended invitation functionality
  
• gadgets.cache
• For easy CDN access
• gadgets.tracking
• vz.vcard
• Functions for vz specific privacy layer
  

VZ Sandbox

Our sandbox is the first instance a freshly developed App has to pass. This is the place where developers can test their newest App revisions before they are published. We currently offer the following features inside our sandbox:

• Rrevision based storage and deployment
  
• Online XML-editor
• Statistics and tracking access
• Logging
• Multi-user access and shared development capabilities
• Integrated previews
  

We strongly believe that OpenSocial should also be taken literally, so we initiated a monthly GeekNight, where all interested developers are informed about our current projects and get a chance to mingle with other industry professionals.

For more information on our GeekNight events, feel free to visit
http://www.studivz.net/geeknight.

Posted by Sebastian Galonska, VZnet Netzwerke Ltd