Open Social

Hi guys!

These days almost everyone are using Orkut, facebook and many other social networking sites. One of the organization is supporting them with necessary interfaces to communicate among themselves. Its called OpenSocial. Lets have some introduction about its enterprise view only. In my next blog, I will give complete details of it.

Before diving into how OpenSocial can benefit the enterprise, it is helpful first to understand OpenSocial's history, especially the evolution from its Social Networking Site (SNS) roots into a broader platform for social interaction and application interoperability. As social networking became more popular, there was increasing pressure on these sites to add differentiated capabilities and attract more users. A business model was also emerging where vendors wanted to offer their services into these social networks. Before OpenSocial, the notion of deploying an application into a social network was strictly a proprietary exercise. What's worse, if they had applications for each platform, they had to maintain them, account for programming model dissimilarities, translate each one, and so on.

OpenSocial provided a solution to these problems by serving as an open, community-driven, set of specifications that standardized the construction and deployment of social applications. It provided a common programming and deployment model for Web 2.0 user interface components, for accessing social graphs, and for working with activities. Applications built to the OpenSocial specification could be deployed into any social network that complied with the specification.

In November of 2007, OpenSocial was launched. Independent developers finally had a framework they could use to build applications that would run in any OpenSocial compliant site. OpenSocial was quickly adopted by many traditional social network sites including MySpace, Orkut, hi5, and Ning. The population of end-users - the people running OpenSocial applications on various OpenSocial container sites - began to grow exponentially. In addition to a strong upsurge in the overall population of end-users, the OpenSocial global developer community also blossomed and quickly provided numerous new applications for these new OpenSocial containers to plug into their sites. The benefit to the community of social network providers was immediate - they now had a vast pool of OpenSocial developers from which to draw from in order to enhance their application offerings. Similarly, developers benefited by being able to deploy their applications to a variety of social network, and not just one targeted specifically.

As OpenSocial continued its fast paced growth in the first year, so did its evolution. In the early days of OpenSocial, its primary focus was consumer social networks. In mid 2008 however, an architectural enhancement known as the "REST APIs" was introduced in version 0.8 of the OpenSocial specification. The REST APIs provided a programmatic mechanism for integrating back end systems, a common requirement within enterprises. In 2009, as version 0.9 was released, OpenSocial's overall end user population had reportedly reached approximately 800 million. This number is based on the self reported end user populations of containers that now support OpenSocial.

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