It appears I spoke too soon. About 5 minutes ago Google announced Orkut will launch their applications to all users the last week in February. I was close – an announcement was made, and they will be launching OpenSocial 0.7 tomorrow, the same day MySpace opens to developers. In essence, OpenSocial is going live tomorrow. It just won’t be visible to the public until the last week in February. It appears, as I said, Google had to have the last word.
Category: OpenSocial
Expect Big Things From Google Tomorrow
As I mentioned earlier, I think the MySpace launch is way bigger than just MySpace. Watch carefully tomorrow. There have been several announcements at Google that hint that you may just see Orkut go live tomorrow as well. From the Release Notes for the latest version of OpenSocial (0.7), under Orkut container update:
 “Close for gadget whitelist submission Feb 5”
I’m not quite sure what this fully means, other than it looks like things are finishing up for Orkut tomorrow. Also, today Google released a blog post, of which they stated:
The best news is that, based on numerous discussions with both app developers as well as container sites, we believe OpenSocial 0.7 has all the necessary pieces to launch OpenSocial apps to users at scale. In fact, both hi5 and orkut will be using OpenSocial 0.7 for their upcoming user-facing launches.
On the mailing list today (just 6 hours ago), an Orkut developer stated:
We haven’t pushed v0.7 yet, but we’re planning to do it soon. Â In the
meantime, use feature=”opensocial-0.6″ and I’ll post when v0.7 is
live.
It’s looking like 0.7 is soon to go live “soon”, and will more than likely with it, make it very possible for sites like Orkut who have been in testing for so long to go live with it (rather than just a developer sandbox like it has now). MySpace itself will release in a sandbox for about a month on it (I just got word MySpace has officially launched to developers). Is Orkut getting ready to do a one-up on MySpace tomorrow?
Demo of Prologue With Joseph Scott, Developer at Automattic
I sat down for lunch at Applebees with Joseph Scott, a Developer at Automattic, who was the developer on the Prologue project. As I mentioned earlier, Prologue is essentially, as I term it, “OpenSocial for Twitter“, and allows you to create your own Twitter-like community on any WordPress blog with the addition of just a simple WordPress theme. In the demo, he shows how it works, and then we discuss potential uses for the theme, and ways one can use Prologue in their own Blogging environment. It was an enjoyable and interesting conversation!
Demo of Prologue With Joseph Scott, Developer at Automattic from Jesse Stay on Vimeo.
MySpace Announces Developer Platform, OpenSocial to Leave Beta Feb. 5?
Tonight, MySpace released a signup to enter their development platform. Mashable is reporting that the Platform will go live February 5, and will support OpenSocial from day 1. The MySpace Platform is also rumored to provide revenue sharing options for developers, perhaps providing a solution to the ad sharing networks becoming so rampant on Facebook today.
However, I think the really big news is that MySpace is talking about actually launching their platform on February 5. I have yet to hear that it will be a beta like all the other networks currently. OpenSocial is currently at version 0.7, so that means they are nearing production. Does this mean OpenSocial will officially be out of beta by February 5? I think this could very well be the case, and possibly the reason for MySpace’s late entry – expect this to happen very soon.
Prologue – OpenSocial for Twitter
Just today, Matt Mullenweg, founding developer and owner of Automattic, announced a new, open source, theme for WordPress called Prologue. The theme essentially turns your blog into a “mini-Twitter”, with a “Whatcha up to?” text box at the top where your users can post what they are currently doing. This is an excellent way to build community on a site, just for your own users – it will be interesting, as cell phone networks open up, to see if there will be ways to integrate “mini-communities” such as this onto users’ cell phones. I also anticipate someone writing some sort of Twitter plugin that integrates with this theme, and I’d love to figure out a way to use this theme in conjunction with my current theme so I can add this as a link to my current blog.
The theme has been released as Open Source, completely free, under the GPL. The release of this reminds me very much of Google’s OpenSocial initiative, of which they are releasing platform code, very similar to the way Facebook’s platform works (Facebook is a very closed platform currently), for anyone and everyone to load onto their own blogs as they wish. Basically, you can “create your own Twitter” with this code they are releasing!
Joseph Scott, a very good friend of mine, was one of the writers of this and he’s going to give me a demo this Thursday – I’ll post a video of it when I’m done (unless someone wants to buy me an N95, which I’ll post live via Qik.com!). Matt Mullenweg will also be in town this Saturday and meeting with local bloggers and social media advocates – if I can make it work, I may try some video of that as well.
Why Facebook Did *Not* Release Their Platform Last Night
It’s all over the web right now that Facebook supposedly “released their platform last night”. I want to clarify the situation – Facebook did not release their platform last night! What Facebook did release, as the title of their announcement states, is a Javascript Client API library for Facebook.
First, let’s discuss what a platform is. A platform is simply this – an interface to a major website or operating system, of which Software Developers can write their own software for. Back in May, Facebook opened their platform for developers. They have also announced plans to license their platform to third party websites at one point in the future. However, after last nights release of a javascript library, I still do not have the capability to let other Facebook developers write applications, using the same architecture (think Bebo) as Facebook on my own website.
What Facebook released last night is simply a client-based API (that loads into the user’s memory) which has access to access Facebook Data for an application that already exists on Facebook’s systems. I am still tied to Facebook with this, it requires an application API key like all other APIs, and nothing has changed. In fact, the Javascript library is even more limited than the other, server-side APIs, in that I cannot upload Photos with the Javascript library like I can, say, in PHP or Perl.
What you can do is have access to an existing application on Facebook’s servers, and tie your external website to that application. This has always been the case with the Facebook API, and will continue to be in the future. iLike uses this with their iTunes application. We’re Related uses this in their registration process on the FamilyLink.com site. It’s just you can now do it in Javascript.
I was going to blog on this last night when the announcement came out, but the announcement last night does mean something significant. It means Facebook is starting to compete with OpenSocial. OpenSocial, a javascript-based library currently, gives you access to a library of friends on a single social network, only requiring static html to access that API, just like Facebook’s new API library does. What OpenSocial has that Facebook doesn’t however, is what they term the “Apache Shindig Project”. Shindig is a truly open platform, which does allow you to allow your own users to create their own apps on your site only, and even share them with other Shindig-supported websites.
I repeat – Facebook is not there yet! The announcement last night means Facebook is closer to competing with OpenSocial, but they are still just as closed as they have always been.
Next Utah Social Media Developers Garage Meeting: February 2nd
I have learned from Joseph Scott (a local developer at Automattic, the owners of WordPress) that Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress will be in town on February 2nd. Originally we were going to plan on the next Utah SMDev meeting being February 12th, but due to Matt’s appearance, we’re going to join other interested bloggers and developers on February 2nd at the Taj India at 12pm. A Facebook event will be created, but please also be sure to RSVP at the official event page here. Again, here are the details:
Date: Saturday, February 2, 2008
Time: 12:00 PM (noon)
RSVP: at Upcoming Event Page
Place:
Taj India Restaurant
3540 South State St
Salt Lake City, Utah 84115
Taj India has Wi-Fi so bring your laptops and be ready for a great time! Our next meeting will be the second Tuesday in April (April 8). I’ll announce that again here as plans are solidified.
UPDATE: I previously said the meeting was February 5th – that is INCORRECT. The correct date is February 2nd, so be sure your calendars are correct!
Jesse Stay is Now a Bebo Developer and Consultant!
That’s right – you may now add Bebo to my list of expertise. You may notice there’s a new category to the right – “Bebo”. The popular website Bebo.com, that I guess one could compare much closer to MySpace than Facebook announced late yesterday night that they were opening up their platform to developers. Before this, the platform was open to a small number of developers developing in a private beta of their application space.
I have started delving into their API, and I have to admit – I’m impressed! Their system is much more responsive than Facebooks (Facebook was recently rated as one of the slowest Social Networking sites), and in setting up a basic app, I have to admit it is a little more user-friendly than on Facebook. While it is much more user-friendly, Bebo has striven to maintain compatibility with Facebook. Almost every aspect of their API, from the API itself, to its FBML derivative called SNML is near duplicate. Bebo denies being the first to use the 3rd party partner-licensed platform Facebook is soon to release, but I have to admit, Bebo has done an excellent job at replicating what Facebook has done. If only Google could do the same with Open Social. Could this bring the developer community over to Bebo from Facebook?
Stay tuned – on SocialOptimize.com we’ll be posting some white papers on statistics surrounding Bebo, demographics, traffic, users, etc. as we find them. My partner, Allan Young is hard at work putting those numbers together. In addition to that, I’m working on migrating the WWW::Faceboook::API Perl libraries over to Bebo.
On a side note – one ironic thing I found about Bebo is that somehow, my 84 year old Grandmother is on Bebo. She has been sick lately, so I can’t imagine how old that account is. How many people can say their Grandmother is their friend on a social network??? 🙂
SocialToo.com — Your Companion to the Social Web
I’ve been working on a little side project lately, that I think will solve a lot of the headaches caused by lack of certain features in the Social Landscape. In the spirit of the book Jason and I are writing, my company, SocialOptimize.com is announcing the beta launch of SocialToo.com. What is it? It is intended to be a companion to the Social Web – the features you can’t find in the social landscape you will find here. Will it replace your Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or Plaxo account? Probably not, but it will make your experience in those Social Networks much better and compliment that experience.
Over the coming weeks (I have a strong release early, release often policy), you’ll see new features launched on the site that will make your Social experience better. The site is still very basic, but as a taste of what’s to come, for all those that sign up now we’ll enable auto following of all those that follow you on Twitter. Within the next week we’ll add the ability to blacklist those that follow you (so it doesn’t follow them). Soon after that we’ll add statistics, better bulk operations on your followers and following, and many more features. Soon we’ll start to incorporate Facebook data, linking your Twitter account with your Facebook account. After that, maybe Plaxo, or MySpace, or LinkedIn. These are all ideas of where we’re going with this.
So, I encourage all to register to find out what’s to come. Again, all those that register with their Twitter username and password will be automatically given auto-follow capabilities on their Twitter account! Keep following here and I’ll update as we progress.
Utah Social Media Developers Garage a Success!
Utah had it’s very first Social Media Garage meeting as a non-Facebook specific group yesterday, December 11. Phil Burns and I started the Utah Facebook Developers Garage, and at our October meeting, the group agreed to making our name much more generic so we could support technologies such as Open Social. I think the meeting yesterday went better than I could have expected.
Jeff Barr, evangelist for Amazon Web Services, was our featured guest speaker for the night. He spoke on Amazon ECS (E-Commerce Service), S3 (Simple Storage Service), EC2 (Electric Compute Cloud), and SQS (Simple Queue Service). I think it was very educational for all that were there – many there were not aware of what Amazon was doing.
Towards the end he featured Social Media technologies that are currently using AWS. He talked about Paul Allen (the younger)‘s We’re Related (a company I consulted for as they were planning the software) and their tremendous success in dealing with 1.8 million users in just 2 months, utilizing AWS, S3 and EC2 to help them with the process. He featured a couple other examples, including iLike, that were also using their services to scale on Facebook.
My favorite feature of the night was Jeff Barr’s demo of how he uses Second Life to help him evangelize, and present AWS to a worldwide audience. He gave one of the coolest demos I’ve seen on how he’s using the second life rendering engine to model the AWS systems in 3D. He clicks on a little Amazon logo in his model, and in animated 3D in Facebook it all runs, demonstrating the process flow in real time right there in Second Life! He says he plans to tie in a real system to this model, feeding real data to display the data in a real environment. He also showed how he has weekly meetings with AWS developers in right in Second Life, and went on to show a presentation he had made in Second Life to a users group half-way around the world!
Jeff Barr, after last night, convinced me that Second Life is here to stay – it’s an invaluable tool that, if used right can be a great method of communication, presentation, and meeting with a worldwide audience. He convinced me that Second Life is even more useful for businesses than it is for the average non-business user using the service! I strongly suggest if you are a business owner, looking at a Second Life strategy to communicate better with customers, lead-gen with customers, and build new business.
After Jeff’s talk, we went over a few more samples of sites using AWS. The Bungee Labs folk demoed some of their services using the service. One guy (trying to remember his name – sorry, I promise I’ll get it!) showed off his site that counts down to 2008 in binary (http://11111011000.com/ is 2008 in binary)! I talked about my Holy Rolls applications (We’re Catholic and We’re Baptist) and how for an application with 4-5 thousand pageviews a day, AWS handles it fine, and I always have the ability to scale if I need to.
When the event was over we all put our names into a Santa Clause hat and drew for 2 Google Water Bottles given to us by Google Code, and some cool WordPress T-shirts provided by Joseph Scott, from Automattic. We then finished the evening with a great competition (and great singing voices!) of Rock Band on the PS3. It was quite a Social!
