A closer look at Open Social

November 2nd, 2007 Posted by Don Albrecht

If you haven’t heard already, OpenSocial is a multi-vendor Social networking API similar to the Facebook API’s. It is also, a very different environment from the Facebook API’s you may already be using.

If you’re not already familiar with Facebook development, It’s pretty much a one way street.
You deliver a page marked up in FBML (A facebook specific markup language) to facebook in response to requests from facebook. More importantly, Your application lives solely in the Facebook realm you can really only push data to it. Put simply, what happens in Facebook, stays in Facebook.

The new Open Social standard is a significantly friendlier place to deploy applications for several reasons.

No need to use FBML, HTML & Javascript work just fine.
You can use whatever Javascript Library you want, OpenSocial uses it’s own namespace to prevent conflicts.
Persistent storage, You don’t need to handle everything on your server and an application can be written exclusively in javascript + html without any need for a server backend. All data can be stored to the social network.
Universal Feed. All OpenSocial apps can write to a shared Activities feed.
Universal Friends. Friends can transfer seamlessly between Open Social applications
You can brand & Host yourself. Unlike Facebook, you can pull data into your application instead of solely pushing it into the Facebook world.

You can find the OpenSocial API’s at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/