Wednesday in San Francisco: OpenSocial Hackathon at Six Apart

By Dan Peterson, Product Manager

On Wednesday (tomorrow!) Six Apart will be hosting an OpenSocial Hackathon at their office in San Francisco to let people get their hands dirty with OpenSocial, Shindig, and Caja. In addition to the Googlers working on OpenSocial, you'll be able to chat with engineers from at least hi5, MySpace, Oracle, Orkut, and Plaxo. The event starts at 4pm PST and will be going deep into the night -- so it's okay if you can't make it right on time. The office is conveniently located near Macworld, not to mention Caltrain, BART, and MUNI.

We'd love it if you could RSVP on Upcoming, though it isn't formally required. Be sure to bring your laptop and perhaps a few friends.

Of course, there will be copious beer and pizza.

Read More

An OpenSocial HappyHour party with Gears

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Chandra Patni is an engineer at IGN who saw a good way to develop using OpenSocial. Some hacking later, and he ended up with happyhour, an open source OpenSocial container powered by Google Gears.

Brad Neuberg and myself got together with Chandra to discuss the project.

In the conversation below you will hear about:

• How happyhour increases developer productivity when building OpenSocial components
• How designers have been able to work with his OpenSocial applications with happyhour
• How happyhour differs from another open source container, Apache Shindig
• His experience, and lessons learned using Gears
• How he added support for ISO dates for Gears using SQLite

There is room for potential collaboration with Apache Shindig too. The projects can share the same data format, or happyhour could even hook into Apache Shindig in some way.

If you would like to make changes on the fly as you develop your OpenSocial applications, then give happyhour a look. Want to see a few more details about the code? Read more over at the Gears blog.

Read More

Brian McCallister on Ning, OpenSocial, and Apache Shindig

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

When I read an email sent to an Apache Software Foundation mailing list suggesting an open source project for OpenSocial, I wasn't surprised to see it come from Brian McCallister, a prolific open source developer that I met years ago in a former life.

Brian McCallister now works at Ning, the social network outsourcer, and sat down to talk to me about topics revolving around Ning, OpenSocial, and Apache Shindig.

What will you learn from this chat?

• What Ning is all about
• Why Ning and Brian think about OpenSocial, and why developers should be interested
• The parts and pieces of OpenSocial from the standpoint of a developer, and a third party container
• How Brian thinks that we will get more than just "Write one, learn everywhere"
• What Apache Shindig is all about
• How Shindig allows you to do simple local development, which changes the game with respect to your development lifecycle

Read More

Google Developer Podcast Episode Eleven: OpenSocial with Patrick Chanezon

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

The announcement of the OpenSocial project is really exciting, so I was really glad to drag Patrick away from his work to take some time to chat with me about it.

Using iTunes?

Patrick is easy to talk too, and I think that comes across in the interview itself. There has been a lot of pre-release speculation on what OpenSocial really is, and the press has put out wildly different ideas over the last couple of weeks. Patrick lays out the facts of the announcement.

He covers a lot, including:

• What has actually been released
• What OpenSocial isn't
• Details on the various APIs:
  • People Data API: You can get access to owners and viewers, and their friends
  • Persistence Data API: Store simple hash table data for the users using your application
  • Activities Data API: Like the Facebook News feed
• What it means to be an OpenSocial "container"
• Fun social apps that Patrick has seen developed by the trusted testers

Sit back and listen to Patrick's dulcet French tones as he takes you through all things OpenSocial.

You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the show (click here for iTunes one-click subscribe).

Also, check out video from the Campfire One event and interviews with a subset of the partners involved in the OpenSocial launch. Having a large number of application developers and container vendors show what they have already done gives you a glimpse to the future.

Now I want to record the next podcast by the fire.

Read More