OpenSocial Foundation becomes OW2 Consortium Associate Member, announces availability of OpenSocial 2.5 specification

Paris, France – November 30, 2012 – OpenSocial Foundation announced today on becoming an OW2 associate member. This formal relationship brings two market-leading open foundations together, bringing the message of social cloud middleware to a larger worldwide market. OpenSocial Foundation is a Platinum sponsor and exhibitor at this year’s OW2Con, with foundation president Mark Weitzel keynoting today on how open standards and open source are driving social business.

“The OpenSocial Foundation continues its commitment to reaching out across the industry to build a robust social business ecosystem. We are excited to work closer with OW2 and it’s consortium members to further advance standard based social middleware.” said Mark Weitzel, President of the OpenSocial Foundation

"We were excited to have OpenSocial as a Platinum sponsor of OW2 Con this year." said Cedric Thomas, CEO of the OW2 Consortum. "With the growth of cloud computing and SaaS delivered social business applications there is a great deal of synergy between OpenSocial and OW2. It only seemed natural to find ways to align our efforts more closely together. We look to move away from legacy portal systems and towards social systems of engagement, we look forward to working with the OpenSocial and Apache Rave communities to define and build the next generation open, standards based, social platform."

Announcement of OpenSocial 2.5 specification.

In addition, the OpenSocial Foundation also announces today the general availability of version 2.5 of the OpenSocial specification. This release adds in new features that were previously in incubation, such as the Common Container, which formalizes the APIs for application lifecycle and management, as well as adds new capabilities such as the ability to introspect the services with an OpenSocial platform through a metadata API.

“OpenSocial provides the leading and most mature standards based component model for SaaS delivered social business applications.”, said Mark Weitzel, President of the OpenSocial Foundation.
“Version 2.5 continues to set the benchmark for community driven innovation and fosters interoperability, choice, consistency, innovation, and quality between social platforms and 3rd party applications.”

For a more complete list of the changes, see the full release notes at http://bit.ly/os25publishedspecissues, and you can download the full specification at http://docs.opensocial.org/display/OSD/Specs.

About OW2
Founded in January 2007, OW2 is an independent industry community dedicated to developing open source code infrastructure and to fostering a vibrant community and business ecosystem. The OW2 Consortium hosts some one hundred technology Projects, including ASM,Bonita, eXo Platorm, Funambol, JOnAS, Joram, Orbeon Forms, PEtALS, SpagoBI and XWiki. More information at: www.ow2.org.

About OpenSocial
The OpenSocial Foundation, an industry recognized standards body, dedicated to advancing the social web through community innovation and open source. Established in 2008, the Foundation provides the leading and most mature standards based component model for SaaS delivered social business applications. Widely supported by a majority of leading consumer and enterprise social platforms, such as IBM, Jive, and SugarCRM, the OpenSocial specification fosters the development of a growing set of socially-aware off-the-shelf applications. Through open source projects such as Apache Rave and Shindig, it provides a well-defined way for 3rd party applications to richly interact with users directly in their activity stream. For more information, visit www.opensocial.org.