So you've decided that OpenSocial is the next big thing in the online application world, and you want to write an OpenSocial application and win the accolades of all your online peers. Where do you start Well, according to Google's OpenSocial guide, it is a simple four-step process. First, you have to figure out what kind of application you want to build. Second, you should pick a social network on which to start writing first. Third, get comfortable with the Application Programming Interface, or API. And fourth, keep the OpenSocial JavaScript API reference handy at all times.
As easy as that sounds, the devil is in the details, as they say. Many developers struggle to come up with ideas on how to use this OpenSocial platform. But no matter what idea you come up with, it must grab a user's interest quickly. Your objective should be to spread your application throughout all the corners of the social networking sites that support OpenSocial, and the only real way to do that is to get it spread virally by people who want to use it and recommend it to their friends on their network. This means you have to generate a lot of interest in your application. And you gotta do it quickly, because most of the people on the Internet suffer an acute attention deficit disorder for as long as they're connected to the Internet. Nobody is going to want to take five whole minutes to figure out the awesome capabilities of your OpenSocial application. You'll be lucky if you get five seconds.
You must make your app's purpose absolutely clear immediately. If people can't figure out what your app does just by looking at it you're doing something wrong. Also, it may seem obvious, but in a social network setting like most of the supporters of OpenSocial you are going to need to enable the user to do something socially, probably define or express himself in ways that he could not before.
You should also mimic the look and feel of whatever site you find your application on. All web sites have a color scheme and style they adopt, and if your application sticks out like a sore thumb, it will be removed sooner or later. One OpenSocial application company recommends creating different skins for each site you want to actively support, making your application a social chameleon.
Your OpenSocial application should also be able to change over time. The best social applications are ones that involve heavy customization, whether through adjusting a lot of possible settings, or growing over time with the user's actions. Also, your application should display information about the user's contacts somehow. Graphs or charts of common activities between friends are a good way to maintain interest. Everybody wants to see how charts and graphs change over time.
Finally, you should be able to find easy inspiration from real world tasks. People have been interacting socially for thousands of years; it's just that now we're trying to do it on the Internet. People want to communicate in ways that are both new and familiar. Find your inspiration around you.
While your application can exist on all sites that support OpenSocial, it has to start with one of them first. You should choose your site based on what you are familiar with. If you only use LinkedIn, you only have a good understanding of what happens on that site and what kind of application would be useful there, so start there. If you check MySpace every day for friend updates, you can probably figure out a way to make your own personal MySpace experience better, so start there. If you're a Facebook user, however, you're out of luck. Facebook doesn't support OpenSocial. But hi5, Webon, Socialtext, 51.com, Freebar, Friendster, Mail.ru, Netlog, Hyves, ning, orkut, iGoogle, Yahoo, Plaxo Pulse, and minglebox do, just to name a few.
After you're ready to start writing, you need to figure out how to write. Google's Code page has extensive documentation on how to use the OpenSocial application at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial. It tells you about concepts such as containers, social applications, gadgets, and how to make gadgets with JavaScript. It makes clear that many application functions are asynchronous, which means they only get updated when the whole web page gets updated. The API is currently on version 0.8, which means it is still technically in beta. However, it has a long history of versions, which promises a steady stream of updates in the future.
The OpenSocial API Reference comes in very handy when trying to do something beyond the beginning examples. It is a well-supported and generally easy to understand document with many examples and a lot of active discussion online. In traditional Google style it is well laid out. However, it can be a bit confusing. If you want to know more of a step by step method of learning the API, you can take the OpenSocial Tutorial. The tutorial is quite comprehensive and sends you through the steps of making your first gadget using the API.
Google's API focuses on the three core data-items that drive any social networking site; profile details, friends' info, and activities that you do. During its launch one year ago, it was initially criticized as being too simplistic and lacking in functionality, however with the release of subsequent versions of the program now has many more functions.
Yes, OpenSocial is one year old as of last month. During the past year, 315 million OpenSocial applications were installed. There are approximately 7,500 applications and more than 20 sites that support these applications. Additionally, the 0.9 version of OpenSocial is coming out soon, so application developers and users alike should be looking forward to that.
