Google, MySpace team up for social application development

"Our partnership with Google allows developers to gain massive distribution without unnecessary specialised development for every platform," said Chris DeWolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace. "This is about helping the start-up spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network. We're pleased to collaborate with Google to establish a landmark standard for social applications."

Critical mass

As a founding member of OpenSocial, MySpace will provide critical user mass and platform guidance. The OpenSocial standards are designed to evolve through contribution from the open source community and as new features are developed by various partners. Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

"As the most trafficked website in the country and the most popular social network in the world, MySpace is one of the leading forces in the global social web," said Dr Eric Schmidt, chairman of the executive committee and CEO of Google. "We're thrilled to grow our strategic relationship with MySpace by joining forces on this important initiative."

"As an application developer, we're excited to see MySpace adopting the OpenSocial standard for social application development," said Joe Greenstein, CEO of Flixster. "Application developers have been working with MySpace for a long time – this takes what we can do together to a whole new level. The sheer scale of MySpace makes this extremely exciting for us."

“Social networks getting social with each other:

"We're all citizens of a larger web – no network is an island onto itself," said Aber Whitcomb, CTO of MySpace. "We look forward to continuing to develop great technology with Google and all of the OpenSocial participants. It's exciting that social networks are getting social with each other."

The launch of OpenSocial is the first release of technical details for the forthcoming MySpace Platform. Since yesterday, developers are able to start writing applications for OpenSocial at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial which the MySpace Platform will support at launch.

The proliferation of unique APIs across dozens of social websites is forcing developers to choose which ones to write applications for - and then spend their time writing separately for each. OpenSocial gives developers of social applications a single set of APIs to learn for their applications to run on any OpenSocial-enabled website. By providing these simple, standards-based technologies, OpenSocial aims to speed innovation and bring more social features to more places across the web. Users win too: they get more interesting, engaging, and useful features faster.

"The web is fundamentally better when it's social, and we're only just starting to see what's possible when you bring social information into different contexts on the web," said Jeff Huber, SVP of engineering, Google. "There's a lot of innovation that will be spurred simply by creating a standard way for developers to run social applications in more places. With the input and iteration of the community, we hope OpenSocial will become a standard set of technologies for making the web social."

Vast distribution network

One of the most important benefits of OpenSocial is the vast distribution network that developers will have for their applications. The sites that have already committed to supporting OpenSocial -- Bebo, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, mixi, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING -- represent an audience of about 200 million users globally. Critical for time- and resource-strapped developers is being able to "learn once, write anywhere" -- learn the OpenSocial APIs once and then build applications that work with any OpenSocial-enabled websites.

Several developers, including Flixster, FotoFlexer, iLike, RockYou, Slide, Theikos, and VirtualTourist have already built applications that use the OpenSocial APIs. A developer sandbox will be available soon at http://sandbox.orkut.com so developers can go in and start testing the OpenSocial APIs. The goal is to have developers build applications in the sandbox so they can deploy on orkut and ultimately other OpenSocial sites.

The existence of this single programming model also helps websites that are eager to satisfy their users' interest in social features. More developers building social applications more easily translates directly into more features more quickly for websites.

The common method that OpenSocial provides for writing social applications means that websites can engage a much larger pool of third-party developers than they could otherwise. They can direct resources that might have gone to maintaining a proprietary API and supporting its developer community to other projects.

Because OpenSocial intends to remove the hassle from developing for social networks, developers can unleash their creativity anywhere that catches their interest. This will translate into a wave of social features in contexts outside of the personal entertainment and games that are traditionally thought of as the social web.

“Shared infrastructure”

"We fundamentally believe that OpenSocial is the right design philosophy," said Dan Nye, CEO of LinkedIn. "Some social experiences are about photo sharing, some are affinity-based, some professionally oriented--OpenSocial allows each experience to be distinct and provides them a shared infrastructure for development."

The OpenSocial APIs give developers (with users' permission) access to the data needed to build social applications: access to an application user's profile information, their list of friends, and the ability to share their activities with friends. OpenSocial resources for developers and websites will be available at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial.

Developers will have access to:

• Three JavaScript and Gdata APIs to access social functions
  
• A live developer sandbox on orkut at sandbox.orkut.com
  
• Sample code, documentation, and a support group available at http://code.google.com

Websites will have access to:

• A tool to help OpenSocial-enable their websites
  
• A support forum for communicating with Google and other websites
  
• Sample code, documentation, and a support group available at code.google.com