BradPace.com

Last Tuesday I was able to fly to San Francisco to attend the Snap Chat at Hi5 Labs.  Patrick Chanezon who is the Google API evangelist spoke.  He did a great job and it was easy to tell he is a major player in planning and implementing OpenSocial.  He spoke on high level non-technical issues all the way down to coding and specifics on the spec.  Google currently has 40 APIs available with their suite of products.  The 2 major APIs Google is focused on right now are Android (for cell phones) and OpenSocial.

In any new product there is a cycle that it goes through.  First there is a peak of inflated expectations then a trough of disillusionment.  After that there is a slope of enlightenment and finally a plateau of productivity.  Patrick was very clear that OpenSocial had a high peak of inflated expectations at the beginning and then hit a trough of disillusionment.  He hopes that now they are on the uphill slope of enlightenment.  But still have a long way to go before it is ready for real customers and business.

OpenSocial is not intended to make it so you can write your app once and have it work everywhere.  OpenSocial allows us to LEARN ONCE (one system) and write everywhere.  Each app will need to be re-written for each social network.  Each network has a different audience and different features and different data that will be available.  But the point of OpenSocial is that it will be very easy to deploy the same app (with some customization) to many networks in a short amount of time.

The .5 version of the OpenSocial spec had no security at all (or user authentication).  The .6 spec came out at the end of December and had many enhancements and included security and user controls.  The OpenSocial spec is really just an extension of the google gadget API.  They have agreed to use Atom as a standard format for files.  The .7 version of the spec will come out by the end of January and should be ready for actual end users to test.  There will be a .8 version in February that will be ready for production or beta use.

The API can be broken down into 3 main parts:

1)      Access to friends

2)      Activities stream (feeds and invites for virality)

3)      A simple hash map (creates a persistence layer for the apps)

If you want to play with OpenSocial the best way to get started is to use a sandbox to run your code on.  Plaxo, Ning, Hi5, and Orkut all have sandboxes.

Ning and Google have created an Apache open source project called Shindig.  There has been some confusion as to what Shindig is.  Simply put Shindig is a container and back end server components for hosting Open Social apps.  Think of it as plumbing to expose your data.  Google is working on the Java version and Ning is working on the PHP version.  They hope that other companies will do other versions like .net (MySpace?) and ruby(Zing?).

Patrick’s prediction was that MySpace would make a big impact this year.  They did not do much in 2007. They are going to be launching a developer outreach program and will be providing some very cool tools for their system.  MySpace is not done yet and we should see some exciting stuff from them over the next few months.

He also hinted that there will be some OpenSocial development tools coming soon.  Maybe even from Google.  He keeps track of all the cool OpenSocial links at http://del.icio.us/chanezon.

The overall take away from the meeting is that OpenSocial is progressing well and will be ready for some serious development and possibly betas in a month or so.  Plus you have to have the networks implement the most recent version of the spec to actually use it. But he acted like the 4-5 major OpenSocial networks are implementing the versions quickly. But it should be ready for production in March.  Start filling those sandboxes now because OpenSocial will be here sooner than we think.