Here at Mashup Camp Chris Schalk from Google just wrapped up an excellent presentation about Open Social - the open source social networking environment spearheaded by Google along with partners like Myspace, Ning, Plaxo, and hundreds more.
Shindig, the ¨container” for social applications, appears to be ready for outtside development now. The lack of a container was a concern at the initial launch of Open Social.
One can make a strong case that Open Social and the Open Handset Alliance are the most significant open source projects now under broad deployment, both because they are backed by Google dollars and ingenuity More»

Labels: Facebook, open social, opensocial, shindig

Yahoo has just announced an expansion of what it calls the Yahoo Search “Open Ecosystem”.
Yahoo has been a leader for some time in the Web 2.0 space with several applications and innovations such as photo site Flickr and adoption of OpenID. Recently Yahoo opened up their search application for more customization by developers.
Today’s announcement marks a stronger level of committment to new standards that will support the growth and development of the semantic web through the adoption of microformats - basically formats that help standardize the way applications can interact with data. More»

Labels: developers, microformats, Open Source, openid, opensocial, Yahoo

David Recordon of SixApart has a great post on Google’s Social Search API and some of the privacy issues associated with it. He co-authored “Thoughts on the Social Graph” with Brad Fitzpatrick (who joined Google last August to develop the API).
Last August David started developing an open source service that would crawl online relationship data and expose it via an API. He showed snippets of it on his blog (pictures and text), and also gave a brief demo at the Data Sharing Summit. He goes on to say, “We even came close to More»

Labels: Facebook, opensocial, social media, Social Networking

As read on TechCrunch yesterday morning,
MySpace is finally getting ready to pull the trigger on its long-awaited platform for developers. Starting today, programmers can sign up to register for the MySpace API program, which will go live on February 5th. The APIs will allow developers to create social applications for MySpace much like they can already for Facebook. The platform will be compatible with Google’s OpenSocial platform, meaning that applications written for OpenSocial will work on MySpace with a few minimal tweaks.

More details will come out More»

Labels: MySpace, opensocial, social media, widgets

In response the Google’s OpenSocial API which just launched with a splash at the beginning of November, and amidst a lot of critisicm of Facebook’s ‘closed’ platform, Facebook announced yesterday that it is opening up its platform to make it available to other social networking sites. It is licensing its technology so that Facebook apps can run on other social networking sites other than Facebook. There are apparently 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications who can now potentially make their applications available on other social sites. Facebook apps are built using proprietary More»

Labels: Facebook, google, opensocial

For the uninitiated, I will first explain what the social graph is and why it is so talked about today. Almost all of us are on some social network today. In that network, we are linked with people we know either because we were class mates or are colleagues or neighbors, etc. Now, try to imagine every person as a node in a graph and if two people are connected on a network, it means an edge or line is drawn between those two nodes in a social graph. One instance of it would be the following picture which illustrates More»

Labels: Facebook, opensocial, social graph, Social Networking, social networks

The OpenSocial Event on Wednesday was very well received and a lot of fun. Thank you to everyone who attended and to the speakers Chris Schalk, Google Developer Programs at Google, Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo, and Akash Garg, Co-Founder/CTO at Hi5 Networks.
It was a lively and interactive session. The video should be up in a week for anyone who missed it or just wants a recap. Continue the discussion online and here are all the photos.
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Labels: google, opensocial

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Labels: opensocial, social networks

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Labels: Facebook, MySpace, opensocial, Social Networking

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Labels: opensocial, Web Apps, widgets