Open Social
OpenSocial is an open standard API for social networking sites that allows developers to build interoperable social applications across different platforms. It enables social features like user profiles, friend connections, activities, and messaging to be easily added to third-pa
social
networking
interoperability
profiles
friends
activities
messaging
OpenSocial: Build Interoperable Social Apps Across Platforms
An open standard API for social networking sites, enabling developers to add social features to third-party websites and applications
What is Open Social?
OpenSocial is an open standard and set of APIs for social networking platforms led by Google and developed through the OpenSocial Foundation. It allows developers to create applications that access a social network's friends and update feeds. The goal is to enable applications to work across multiple websites and social networks by providing a common API framework.
Some key capabilities offered by OpenSocial include:
- Accessing profile information like name, profile photo, gender, location, etc.
- Reading connections between users to identify friends, followers, etc.
- Publishing activities and posts to the user's stream
- Enabling messaging between application users
- Managing groups within the application
OpenSocial helps developers avoid having to rewrite their applications for each social network by standardizing on APIs. Instead of coding specifically for Facebook's platform or LinkedIn's platform, applications can be built on top of OpenSocial to work across multiple compliant social sites. This saves significant developer resources.
OpenSocial adoption has been led by sites like hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut and others. There are also open source PHP, .NET and Java libraries available to aid OpenSocial application development. Overall, it provides a simpler way to leverage social graph capabilities across today's web.
Open Social Features
Features
- Enables social features like user profiles, friend connections, activities, and messaging
- Allows developers to build social apps across platforms
- Provides a common API for accessing social data across sites
- Supports OpenID for single sign-on authentication
- Includes JavaScript client libraries for building apps
- Integrates with popular frameworks like Shindig
Pricing
- Open Source
Pros
Simplifies social app development
Reduces duplication of effort for developers
Increases reach by enabling apps to work across sites
Leverages open standards for greater adoption
Enables data portability between social platforms
Cons
Limited adoption outside of Google sites
Complexity of supporting multiple social platforms
Requires sites to expose APIs and data
Standards process can be slow to add new features
Official Links
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