Open Social icon

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-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.

The Best Open Social Alternatives

Top Apps like Open Social

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