Social Media Design: Best Practices To Build Your First Open Social Widget

from Robin Good's blog ("Be Smart, Be Independent, Be Good")

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for building social applications across many websites which in the end makes it very easy for a large number of individuals to start developing their own social web applications.

Photo credit: UK Open University - edited by Robin Good

Three characterizing traits make OpenSocial such a very compelling proposition for would-be new social web developers:

a) Developers only need to learn the OpenSocial APIs in order to create web apps that work with any OpenSocial-enabled website.

b) Developers have a broad distribution network to reach users because any website can easily implement OpenSocial.

c) Websites also benefit by engaging a much larger pool of third-party developers than they could without a standard set of APIs.

But how difficult is it for you to develop social apps using OpenSocial?

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Social Media Design: Best Practices To Build Your First Open Social Widget

Facebook v. Open Social

from Widgetbox...

Facebook_v_google Open Social is a set of social networking application APIs that Google is encouraging all social networks to adopt as their application architecture. Its goal is to standardize social networking apps so that they can be run on more than one social network. It's meant to challenge Facebook's tremendous success with their F8 application platform.
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Facebook v. Open Social

How Open is Open Social?

from
dretblog
Erik Wilde's Web and Information Architecture Musings



google's recently announced Open Social API most importantly is an attempt to get some of the attention that facebook attracted through its facebook API. the idea is simply to more or less mirror the facebook API's functionality in a way which is standardized across social networks. that's good, because developers for social networking apps can now more easily develop them across platforms, and the list of initial supporters of Open Social is impressive (Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING).
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How Open is Open Social?

OpenSocial Should Enable Social Network Interoperability

from Abhishek Tiwari's blog...
According to OpenSocial, Social Networks and other similar services can play hosts and implement to the standard Google API’s. Developers can write applications to these API’s and are automatically enabled to deploy them on any one of these hosts. This introduces the “Write Once, Run Anywhere” paradigm in the ecosystem. You can read more on their official website.

According to Google’s Vic Gundotra, this is valuable for both developers and host networks. With respect to Users, he mentions that they will receive “more, more and more”. More Applications, More Choices across More Websites.

Frankly, I disagree with Vic there. “More” is not always good. I will even go to the extent of saying that the idea of “More” is the single biggest problem with the social networking experience today. I have written about Social Network overload several times before.
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OpenSocial Should Enable Social Network Interoperability