Creating Bebo Applications

Intro to creating Bebo Applications presented at Graphing Social Patterns (Bebo has embraced OpenSocial):

OpenSocial and Google App Engine

Patrick Chanezon (API Evangelist) and Paul McDonald (Product Manager for Google App Engine) presented a technical overview of OpenSocial and Google App Engine at Graphing Social Patterns East. If you aren't familiar with OpenSocial see the second presentation below, first.

Adam Lovallo of Inside Facebook was live blogging the session.
Introduction to Google OpenSocial

Here's a video of Patrick Chanezon:


If you're interested in building OpenSocial Applications using Google App Engine, you may want to check out the article Building an OpenSocial App with Google AppEngine by Lane LiaBraaten, Google Developer Programs.

Open Social: Open For Business - Presentation

From the Graphing Social Patterns conference I blogged about the Open Social: Open for Business session. Following are the slides from the session and covers Google OpenSocial, hi5, imeem, MySpace and my.aol.com

Open Social: Open for Business

Next up is the session Open Social: Open for Business. Panelists are Patrick Chanezon (Google), Paul Lindner (hi5), Max Newbould (MySpace) and Sachin Rekhi (imeem).

Open Social offers a standard for everyone. The IT rights of Open Social are owned by Open Social Foundation. Among Open Social members are hi5, imeem, bebo, ning, Oracle, Yahoo!, six apart, LinkedIn, viadeo, friendster, AOL and many more.

Open Social is 88 days old and reaches 275,000,000 users with 66 million installs of 2000+ apps developed by 20,000 developers. 10 million users use applications on Open Social.

Two client APIs : one for javascript and the other for REST.

Three areas:

• people and friends: access friends information programatically.
• activities: see what friends are doing
• persistence: provide state without a server and share data wth friends.
  

Some examples follow next.

An Open Social application has 80% code that can be readily implemented on other OS containers.

If you have a social site and want to implement OS you can use Apache Shindig which has PHP and Java version of it. Shindig makes it really easy to implement. There is a very active mailing list for it.

SocialSite by Sun: Open source project that utilizes Shindig and builds on top of it. Dave "Roller" Johnson announced it at JavaOne. Heavy potential at Enterprise.

iGoogle: 50% userbase in US!

Google Friend Connect:

• Users... more ways to do more things with my friends
• Site owners... more and engaged traffic for site.
  

MySpace Developer Platform:

• 7 months old
• Supporting REST APIs - over a year old
• #1 social network
  

Why Develop for MySpace?

• unique demographics: users you can't find elsewhere
• forthcoming metrics / analytics focused on small to medium developers
• user base is so large, you just need to get a small portion of MySpace users by popularity not virality.
  

Some Metrics of MySpace:

• 60K registered developers
• 1800+ apps
• 15 million installations (3 months)
  

MySpace Developer platform at developer.myspace.com

• IRC: irc.freenode.net #myspacedev
• Email: developerrelations at myspace.com
• Twitter: MySpaceDevTeam
• Dev Jams: range from 2-8 hours, devs bring their laptops and get first hand instruction and help from MDP team members
• Myspace offers free application press releases apply at myspace at spark.pr.com
  

MySpace Developer Platform future:

• application communication channel
• custom notifications
• invites - requesShare App
• Metrics/analytics to playing field
  

Sachin (Imeem):

• Imeem is social network focused on sharing and discovering all kinds of media.
• 24m unique users per month and third largest social network based on US traffic.
• http://imeem.com/developers
• they have made their content licenses to developers allowing them to utilize imeem's legally licensed media.
• Types of applications
• originally Adobe ActionScript 3 Flex Apps
• OpenSocial Javascript APIs (in May)
• External iFrame
• OpenSocial extensions
• immem-specific extensions that allow access to imeem media metadata, including music, videos and photos.
• Example:
• The Echo Chamber application example built on imeem.
  

My.Aol.com

• newest partner with OpenSocial
• 4 brands
• 16 locales
• 12 languages and more on the way
• 55 myAOL portals
• 2-3 new locales per month
  

My.AOL.com Gadgest

• myAOL is an AJAX basde web applciations (uses Dojo)
• moving to Google Gadgets
• this summer their platform will be completely transformed to work with Google Gadgets and Open Social.
• jennifer.consalvo at corp.aol.com