Sociablecode

This is a quick overview of what’s happening in the beautiful, frustrating, and highly hyped OpenSocial machine:

hi5:

1. Much better growth than MySpace, growth rates rise everyday. The only container that actually has viral growth! (Orkut’s 1% of Estonia does not count)
2. Stability issues occasionally that might be fixed now. This heavily stunted viral growth as no one has probably been able to compound their viral growth everyday. Ouch.
3. Huge language barriers with dense communities who do not necessarily speak English. hi5 ramp up your translation services, my i18n file is still in escrow and it hurts. Click here for the full explanation on how to do it.
4. Everything is ready for you on hi5 to explode in growth, once again, we just need stability.
5. Lots of bugs but lots of fixes are happening daily. Unlike MySpace the hi5 devs push daily are machines who are awake at night to help you even with the smallest problems. Paul, Lou, Anil, Zach–you guys are awesome.
6. Best support you’ll ever get is in #hi5dev. And hey it’s 10:30 PM here and they are still awake answering questions.
7. hi5 actually has analytics! Zach expressed in providing analytics later the way Facebook does, we need this quickly!
8. Oh RockYou put out a press release about reaching 2 millions users, that happened about 4-5 days ago so they are probably much bigger now

Suggestion to hi5: The language barrier is a growing issue for many developers. Some developers even see more growth on MySpace. Is there anything you can do to catering our applications harder to native English speaking users? This would let us grow properly until the i18n issue gets resolved. It’s difficult to grow under the dense Thailand users as well as the huge Spanish base.

MySpace:

1. Frustration.
2. EXTREMELY slow development process.
3. Stop staving us off with tricks like presenting us old functionality such as postTo which Zachallia (FreeGifts) has been using since the platform’s inception.
4. Cool you finally found the courage to link the gallery, great now we get a few hundred users and watch the growth decline like it did when you first launched. This is not enough.
5. Vague deadlines, nobody has a damn clue when the viral API is coming out. First it was a couple weeks, those past by, where is it? If postTo was it, that was a mean trick.

Orkut:

1. Yay! You’re launching in about a week except you should probably put this in really tiny font: 10% of your users only.
2. Wait a second, wasn’t Orkut supposed to launch before everyone else? Does anybody really care anymore about a #6-7 social network that has a tiny non-native english speaking population
3. Before you get too excited, Orkut has limited viral API such as no requestShareApp and probably no notifications either.

Other news, I am adamant about releasing my OpenSocial wrapper/framework to the public eventually. I am not sure when but here is an outline of it currently. I have working implementations of it on both my applications. Comments about the structure are appreciated:

A brief overview of some interesting things that it contains:

- Works beautifully on all containers (Orkut, hi5, MySpace)
- owner/viewer PERSON info caching.
- Friend request batching (which can emulate paging very easily).
- Less verbose than opensocial API.
- Like any framework, utility methods to ease the pain.
- Wrappers around everything in case things change.
- Easily obtain person info without it failing on certain non-implemented fields: getUser(person).aggregate(); // Obtains all possible data at once!
- doRequest() (makeRequest) supports caching/refreshing/signed requests.
- Fully implemented viral API that is ready to go.
- MediaItems made easy for viral API.
- Fully tested, mother approved.