Thread: Socialize Using OpenSocial

In this era of Web 2.0, we are witnessing a lot of activities on the social networking front. Many social networking sites have sprung up where users share photos, documents, give comments to movies, and can even throw virtual sheep at one another through some interactive web applications. All such social , networking s'tes realize that they need to.' give more features to their users to retain them. For this, they have opened up their platforms to developers by launching their own APIs, which can be used to create web application.


Since there are lots of social networks on the Internet and even more on enterprise intranets; the developers face the dilemma of customizing their applications according to each site's APIs. It wasn't just bad for the developer, but equally bad for the social networking websites. If a developer can't make his application for a certain social networking website, the users would shift to another website that can provide such application. Therefore a need was stirred up' for standard APIs to develop social apps that could work across different social networks.



Open Social came as an answer to the developers' dilemma. OpenSocial is a set of APIs for building social applications on the web. It allows developers to write an application once that will run anywhere that supports the Open Social APIs. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can now create social applications across multiple websites. Common APIs mean that developers only have to learn once in order to start building social applications for multiple websites, and any website will be able to implement OpenSocial and host social applications. It's good for developers because it has made their work easier and they can focus more on making their apps better rather than customizing their apps for different websites.

Using OpenSocial, developers can create applications now for various OpenSocial community members like MySpace.The benefit of adopting Open Social to websites is that now they can engage a much larger pool of third party developers than they could have engaged for their own APIs. Also now even for enterprise's own social networks on intranets, an enterprise can devote their resources to strategic projects rather than on extensive API development and its support.