Google to open Orkut OpenSocial developer sandbox tonight
The campfire is burning tonight on the Google campus as the company prepares to launch an Orkut sandbox for working with the OpenSocial APIs. Developers will be able to register, get the docs and try out their code on the Orkut "container." Other containers, such as Ning, MySpace and others, will become available based on schedules set by those companies. "Ning is ready to go," said co-founder Marc Andreessen. "We are waiting for the APIs to stabilize."
"In the last two weeks we made one breaking change and everybody had to change their apps. We want reasonable assurance over the next week or two that there are not any other major breaking changes. We want to make it open to the public as soon as possible," said Joe Kraus, director product management (below).
The APIs provide the core functions for tapping into social network data, but each social network "container" will likely build extensions that give them some differentiation based on the features they support.
The smoky campfire was emblematic of Google's first Campfire 1 event, which are designed to bring leading developers to discuss key topic for evolving the Web as a platform. The first will be an informal event at Google’s headquarters, and it will be videotaped and blogged about for public consumption. Given that mandate, I wouldn’t expect any earth-shattering revelations
The topic of the first informal Campire 1 was the SocialOpen APIs of course. Vic Gundotra, head of developer programs at Google, warmed his hands at the campfire and introduced Campfire 1 and OpenSocial. It was more of a victory lap than a discussion of new ideas. (A video tape of the event will available.)
"Tonight is not about GoogleSocial. It's about making the Web more social," Gundotra said.
OpenSocial has access to 200 million users of social networks as of tonight. Facebook is notably absent but Google and Facebook have been talking, despite statements to the contrary from Facebook.
In fact, a few Facebook engineers were in attendance at the event. I asked them about their thoughts on Open Social but they declined to comment. "We aren't talking to the press."
David Glazer (below), who along with Graham Spencer developed the APIs, demoed creating a Hello World application with OpenSocial code. "If you learn Javascript and HTML, the OpenSocial part is easy, "Glazer said.
Slide showed its Top Friends applications built into hi5's social network. Marc Andreessen and Joe Greenstein of Flixster, a social app for reviewing and discovering movies, showed the Flixster application and user experience within the Ning container. iLike showed its application running on Ning, Orkut and hi5 pages, reusing the same code to create rich interfaces on each container.
Amar Gandhi (above), the product manager for Orkut, demoed apps running in the Orkut sandbox, which is designed for developers to test their OpenSocial apps, he said. He showed RockYou's Emote running in the sandbox within Orkut. "Everything that apps need to integrate into the Orkut look and feed and access the friend graph and activity stream are all there. Any app can achieve that level of integration," Gandi said.
Adam Nash, senior product director for LinkedIn, showed a business use case for OpenSocial APIs. Conference Calendar grabs the industry information from a LinkedIn profile, associates releveant conferences and lists people from other social networks who will attend. In addition, saleforce.com was at Campfire 1 to show an application from Theikos that applies OpenSocial to its platform.
The final demos were from Viadeo and MySpace, which demoed Flixster integration (see the video here from the demo at the press conference earlier today).
I ran into Google co-founder Sergey Brin. He said he was excited and amazed at the number of partners and how the Web can come together and work to eliminate inefficiencies.
Information on OpenSocial will be at code.google.com.
Next up: roasting marshmallows at the campfire.
Video from Campfire 1