Danish NadeemCelstec, OUNL

20-01-2009

The Web is better when it’s social” What is OpenSocial? How is OpenSocial useful? OpenSocial: Technology Overview Developing a Social App: a “Hello World“

example on orkut References

Social Networks provide sociability of web.

Millions of users already have signed up for different social networks around the world, number growing everyday.

Building apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues would make web more social.

Slide Source: Chris Schalk @ GoogleTM

…how to build an application that will run on multiple social websites

A common set of APIs for building social applications across multiple websites.

Currently many websites implement OpenSocial: hi5, Hyves, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, XING and so on.

Slide Source: Chris Schalk @ GoogleTM

The existence of single programming model (common set of APIs) helps both developers and websites.

First, developers only have to learn the APIs once in order to build applications that work with any OpenSocial-enabled website.

Second, because any website can implement OpenSocial. Websites can benefit by engaging a much larger pool of third party developers than they could without a standard set of APIs.

Facilitate developers to create applications that access a social network's friends and update feeds (using standard technology : HTML, Javascript).

OpenSocial is based on HTML and JavaScript as well as the Google Gadgets framework.

OpenSocial includes three core APIs for social software applications to access data and core functions on participating social networks

Each API addresses a different aspect: one for People and Friends (people and relationship information) one for Activities (publishing and accessing user activity

information to others e.g reading books, watching movies etc.) one for Persistence (provides a storage mechanism to save and

load data).

What you need?◦ a text editor◦ web hosting (google also provides hosting)◦ an orkut account◦ Access to the orkut sandbox (to test your social

applications)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?><Module>

<ModulePrefs title="Hello World!"> <Require feature="opensocial-0.8" /> </ModulePrefs> <Content type="html"> <![CDATA[ Hello, world! ]]>

</Content> </Module>

Hello world example... Gadgets are specified in XML. The first line is the

standard way to start an XML file. The <Module> tag indicates that this XML file

contains a gadget. The <ModulePrefs> tag contains information about

the gadget such as its title, description, author, and other optional features.

The line <Content type="html"> indicates that the gadget's content type is HTML.

<![CDATA[ ...insert HTML here... ]]> is used to enclose HTML when a gadget's content type is html.

</Content> signifies the end of the Content section </Module> signifies the end of the gadget definition

Listing friends example app

Open social can make the web more social

Developers benefit by using common APIs for multiple websites.◦ They can build social applications on different

social network sites (orkut, Ning, hi5, MySpace ...)

OpenSocial version 0.8 is released

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial/

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/