Getting started with Open Social

OpenSocial is an open-source API for online communication and collaboration. OpenSocial Opens in a new window provides ready made, off the shelf components, such as calendars, what books are being read and even what tomorrow's weather is going to be like.

The problem with bulding applications for social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo is that they all use different API and provide different frameworks to support their own website.

OpenSocial is effectively a standard framework that allows one application to work for the majority of any other social networking site. Therefore, coding with OpenSocial removes the need to juggle different versions of applications for different sites with a set of different API functions.

Handling Data

Google Gadgets can maintain user details and even a collection of a person's friends without the developer having to worry about connection strings or any repository of data. OpenSocial provides these functions within the API. The beauty of this approach is that for any given gadget OpenSocial provides the functionality to consume a wide range of data available within the Wave.

Last updated: 03 June, 2009



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