Sociablecode

Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google today announced they have agreed to form the OpenSocial Foundation to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web. Yahoo!’s support of OpenSocial and role as a founding member of the new foundation are landmarks for the rapidly growing specification which will now offer developers the potential to connect with more than 500 million people worldwide.

The OpenSocial Foundation website at www.opensocial.org will serve as the portal for the community to find all information about OpenSocial and the foundation as they evolve. Developers and website owners can now visit www.opensocial.org for the latest specifications, links to other resources, and the opportunity to get involved.

I think the best way to get Opensocial into full momentum is really participating, you’ll see me there helping out in my own way. I hope you can as well, whether you work for a huge company like Slide or run your own startup business with a tight budget.

Full press release can be found here.

I’ve been a bit discouraged as of late about how some applications are getting massive amounts of installations and how my measly little 140 installs was possibly worth throwing away but big players on Facebook have told me to stick with it and I am not leaving until I see what happens after viral API is implemented.

Ever wonder how the hell you amass 6000+ installs on a platform with no viral API, no link to the application directory on profile pages, no real publicity to its own mainstream users?

Meet Pokey, the retard 3d dog:

All you need is a lot of money in the bank, how’s that for leveling the playing field MySpace?

Anyhow, I’ve placed all focus on hi5. The platform is using shindig, the engineers fix bugs on a daily basis and push daily (even on weekends) and they have fully implemented working viral API that I have tested personally on a second application I am building for Opensocial. requestShareApp() works and requestSendMessage can send a user NOTIFICATION or an EMAIL to a user. requestCreateActivity works awesomely and both requestSendMessage and requestCreateActivity both can parse <a> tags for you to create links. hi5 is offering free spanish translation and free hosting to new application developers at Joyent. Take that MySpace, oh and hey, they aren’t as buggy either making it the best place to develop your applications initially and then pushing them out to MySpace and Orkut later.

Though Facebook purportedly declined to join OpenSocial because of privacy concerns, there have been several major controversies surrounding their protection of user privacy in the recent past, most notably the release of the news feed, which many believe to be Facebook’s value equivalent of ‘PageRank,’ and Beacon, the spine-tinglingly creepy initially-opt-out, still-not-totally-opt-in, social-graph-exploiting remarketing program.

Well if you haven’t already, make sure you tweak your (blatantly non-exhaustive) privacy settings.

465 practically live applications and encounting on MySpace, awesome job everyone! This report can be seen via zynganomics.com. I think a substantial amount of activity is extremely low but that’s what you get as MySpace isn’t even really launched quite yet–no viral API implementation = platform fail at the moment. On another note though, MySpace seems to have released an official REST API library for PHP. Seems lots of patches are occurring and many applications are iterating constantly and trying to find new ways to thrive due to viral API desertion as I am calling it right now. Some people have figured out their own ways so I’d like to highlight them. Blake’s Vampire, Slayers style applications which are banking on getting people to throw their link around so users can “bite” each other. It’s old school and it works. I am trying my own hands at combining a flash widget for SuperFortune Cookie that is embeddable on users pages so friends can see fortunes from other friends. A bunch of applications are getting through via simple brand recognition (e.g. FreeGifts, sorry Zachallia). In anyevent, there’s honestly not much going on over at the MySpace platform right now, it’s basically just a waiting game till we see the APIs we need. Max, you still owe me that swift kick in the ass you’re supposed to give the manager! On the plus side, it seems they have the application approval process on a maintainable path for now.

Anyhow, this post is really about hi5 and what they are doing (hence the title) as they have had the most realistic launch plans to date and now they are only a week or so away. Let’s highlight what everyone is going to drool over. Basically from the hi5 platform you can expect everything and more that you got from MySpace. You have the big set of REST API, fairly stable javascript client code, and it came out straight from the Apache shindig project. So where’s the drool part? Lou Moore gave me the scoop in IRC today: Viral API implementaiton for requestShareApp, requestCreateActivity, and requestSendMessage (TYPEs: NOTIFICATION, EMAIL). Lou Moore stated that limits, restrictions, etc will be posted in the official viral guidelines. From what I gather, it’s likely to be similar to what Orkut stated initially as far as limitations so don’t expect this to be very liberal about what you can do, but at least it is there for now. hi5 is also doing something very nice for the top 100 developers which I’ve actually been selected for: Free webhosting from Joyent (Similar to the package Facebook gives you) for 6 months, Free Spanish translation, and initial inclusion in the directory for their launch. hi5 has already started their own IRC channel: #hi5dev (irc.freenode.net) and the engineers, notably Anil, Lou Moore, and the big celebrity apparently of Opensocial these days Paul Lindner (shindig contributor) are all very helpful and adamant about making their launch successful. Hope to see you on hi5 when they launch March 31! If I were to say, their launch will be the biggest and most successful thus far with their implementation of viral APIs. There hasn’t been a network yet to introduce this, so let the real games begin.

Also, an announcement from me, I should be releasing an opensource Opensocial Javascript framework/wrapper to ease everyone’s lives around the 31st or a few weeks after, stay tuned for that. A few friends of mine are playing around with it to make sure it’s stable and easy to use. The goal is to minimize the amount of documentation you have to read and minimize the amount of verbose code you have to write.

Oh and by the way…Where did Orkut go? Weren’t you launching nearly 3-4 weeks ago?

…not that anyone’s counting.

But if you were, you would want to go here.

It’s no secret that many developers have been waiting in the wings for an OpenSocial RESTful API.

John Panzer has proposed an Atom/JSON standard. Give it a read and contribute.

pmarca does indeed have every reason to be happy.

More impressive than the total number of networks (larger than all of their ‘direct’ competitors combined), is the activity metric, which they put at around 70%. Reporting active networks/members is an absolute must for any social media property wishing to be taken seriously. After all, spam accounts are negative, not positive, in value.

I am also really pleased with Marc’s timing as my network is featured on the front page of Ning.

Kudos to the folks at Ning, who have done a lot of heavy lifting to get this far. The forums (developer and network creator) are pretty helpful, especially the Network Creator community.

Where is Ning with OpenSocial? Good question. They promise to be updating to 0.7 soon. Then we can get to hassling them for details like multiple app views.

First off, Suhail and I have been either lucky or well-prepared (or both), as our apps made it in within the first 24 hours. Others have had a really tough time.

Zach brings up a great point in the IRC: pay a lot of attention to your application and profile pictures. These apps are sitting in a queue, and one common denominator of apps that seem to be getting attention is that they look professional at a glance, i.e. if a reviewer hypothetically was looking at a long list of submitted apps and their info, including pics.

Be sure to check out:

• SuperFortune Cookie
• Brazilian Portuguese

More coming soon. I’m submitting more language applications today, and will post links to them as I get them approved (fingers firmly crossed).

Also from the venerable iWiddit:

• A-List / D-List

That’s right folks, MySpace has pseudo-officially launched! I just got my application approved and I took a moment to gaze at the “App Status: Live” status before I started debugging and fine tuning my application further. I have some major Internet Explorer issues which I am yet to figure out but it’s available if you wish to install it: SuperFortune Cookie

Alright, enough shameless plugging, let’s talk about what lots of people are talking about in terms of what it takes. People are having problems with this so I am just going to answer all your questions in the post or at least try to anyway. I’ll add more to this post as I see them hit the IRC channel. Many of you will notice that your application is not getting approved and there are good reasons:

READ THE GUIDELINES

My advice is don’t push your limits right now. Play to the rules, don’t try to win on technicalities. Push your limits when reviewers see that they can trust your application after you get approved. Think about it in their perspective, it’s difficult to know what’s good and what’s bad but it’s a lot easier to suspend an application that is not following the guidelines to ensure the security of their users.

1. You cannot have ANY external scripts or CSS in your profile and home surfaces on your application–the canvas page is the only place this is allowed. None whatsoever. Don’t try to be tricky and use makeRequest() to import your entire views so you have control over it. You are circumventing the guidelines and the MySpace reviewers and engineers are not stupid. Make your primary HTML markup relatively static. You can makeRequest() small things like getting a new fortune message. Do not use .innerHTML to dynamically inject markup, Javascript, and CSS in to your views.

2. Do not automatically shift users to things via target=”_top” and jack the entire window space from the user. You are doomed to getting approved.

3. If you get suspended, the reviewers found something wrong. Fix it, you should be able to unsuspend yourself via the MyApps page. (At the time of this writing unsuspending is having problems, wait it out)

4. iframes are okay on the canvas page but not on the profile/home surface.

Follow the guidelines, make a valuable application that does more than jiggle and broadcast “hello world” and you’re likely to get in. Applications are getting reviewed around the clock. I am not a big developer from any company, so yes, even the little guys (me) are getting in.

Could it be true?

via nytimes.com:

Yahoo intends to join OpenSocial, a Google-led alliance that is developing a common set of standards so developers can create programs that run on many social networks and other Web sites, according to a person with direct knowledge of Yahoo’s plans.

Yahoo’s backing, which could be announced as early as this week, would bring a large base of users to the OpenSocial alliance, which is seen as a counterweight to Facebook’s successful courtship of application developers. The alliance, which was announced in the fall, already includes MySpace, Bebo and several other social networking sites.

Yahoo’s participation “would mean that the site with the largest group of users, and with the largest base of registered users, would be joining OpenSocial,” said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Well that would rock! Let’s keep our fingers crossed, though - as the article points out - following Yahoo’s recent support of Hadoop and especially OpenID, an alliance with OpenSocial may be very plausible.