Sociablecode

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?