Opensocial !! the buzzword everywhere. What is it actually? Well, being an opensocial application developer I am starting this blog to help the newbies.
Constituting an important and integral part of "Web 2.0", opensocial applications facilitate easy publishing of web applications which operate hassle free on top of several social networking sites including myspace, ning, orkut, hi5 to name a few.
The key benefit of developing an opensocial application is the considerable reduction in the development time. This comes by the fact that, one need not develop a different application for each opensocial implementing site. The development is an one time effort. However as of now, once developed an application needs to be submitted individually to every desired opensocial container ( container: a platform / social networking site implementing opensocial api ) . This is because every container has its own guidelines and terms, which are more or less the same across platforms. Based on the guidelines the containers review the applications thoroughly and mail the developer of any changes / errors. For example, if an application has some broken links, the developer would be asked to correct those before resubmitting the application. ( This happened to me when I first submitted )
If I were to define opensocial api, I can say that these are a set of function calls and methods through which the opensocial containers expose limited private data of the current viewer who has the application installed. For example, using this api the application can interact with the container to get the details of the current viewer such as his name, unique id, address , album pictures etc.
This is my first post on the blog. I am determined to write serveral following this based on the encouragement from the readers.
Bye For Now,
KK
