The Open Social Way

Vysr has announced support for OpenSocial applications via their RoamAbout browser plugin. This means you’ll be able to access any OpenSocial Web app no matter where you are online. This is all part of their User-Centric Web initiative.

The Site-centric Web confines users to individual sites in order to use specific apps and services, but the User-Centric Web breaks those barriers and allows users to access those very same apps and services from anywhere on the Web. You’re no longer chained to social networks, and can even communicate with your friends on those sites while somewhere else.

The RoamAbout plugin adds a small vertical row of icons for all of the applications and services that you want to access as you surf the Web. They don’t take up much space and provide a great deal of useful functionality and even some fun if you add some of the games that are available.

In Google Developer Day 2008 in Beijing in yesterday, Kaifu Lee announced Google’s OpenSocial strategy in China.

In addition to MySpace.cn, CityIn and Tianya.cn, seven other Chinese social networking sites will jointly promote OpenSocial platform on their sites, including Xiaonei, 51.com, Douban, Hainei, Tianji, Yiqi.com and a web-base online casual game website 51wan.com. So both Xiaonei and 51.com, two SNS with large user base, will support OpenSocial standard. All these websites are leading or at least 2nd tier SNS in China, if all of them really embrace OpenSocial platform, it would be a great news for those widget developers.

Partly because of lack of hosting sites, the development of widgets in China is far behind the development in Silicon Valley, esp. when you consider how quick a copycats could emerge in China. Now, with the efforts of OpenSocial by Google, we can see the feasibility of building widgets and third-party apps. On the other hand, if the main stream SNS in China adopt OpenSocial platform, it will, at least to some extent, reduce the complexity of developing apps to be in compliance with different platforms.

Of course, there are still some big giants in China’s web who might not join this OpenSocial alliance, such as Tencent and Baidu. What they plan to do will affect the landscape of open platform in China. However, we don’t expect they will launch open platform in near future.

The South Korean social network IDtail has just opened their OpenSocial driven website to all users. This is the first OpenSocial container in Korea, and it launches with four locally developed applications. AhnLab, the developers of IDtail, are holding a conference on OpenSocial on June 13th at the COEX grand ballroom in Seoul, with over four hundred people expected.

It’s great to see OpenSocial continue to spread around the world - if you’re developing OpenSocial applications in Korean or any other language, do make sure to look into the message bundle API so that the apps can easily be localized for new languages and countries.

After Myspace.cn and CityIn, another website in China joins OpenSocial arena. Tianya.cn.cn, one of the most popular BBS forum in China, announced that it launched OpenSocial platform on late May.

We heard many social networking sites started OpenSocial platform, maybe this is the first time you hear a BBS site has a OpenSocial platform. Actually, it is not related to the BBS features of Tianya.cn, but a front page.

In Tianya.cn, each users has a customizable front page, you can add various modules on this page, such as rss feeds. Now they start to allow OpenSocial-based third party apps to be added into the page. But currently there are only three apps available, all from Google. We did not know the details of this Tianya’s platform yet. I haven’t been able to find out the instructions for developers, only an email is provided for Opensocial inquiries and contact.

In 2006, Google China invested in Tianya.cn, so you can understand why Tianya adopts OpenSocial.

With more and more websites in China launch open platform, 2008 will be the year of platform for China’s web. Who will be the next one to join this platform game? How will the whole web ecosystem in China develop when more platforms are ready? Do you think open platform strategy will work in China or not? Is it just a buzz word? Do not hesitate to share your opinions in the comment.

Coca-Cola quietly launched one of their first social media applications last weekend, a bookmarking widget for Facebook called CokeTag. (Coke Singapore also has a Facebook application out, promoting a tie-in with UEFA EURO 2008.) CokeTag is not only a smart play from the company, but also a fairly useful app as far as profile widgets go. The app allows users to create customizable Flash bookmark widgets linking to link collections on any topic they’re passionate about.

Coke is using their social media widget initially to promote their we8 project, which is a “cultural exchange” of top artists and designers from China, paired with Western musicians. we8 is part of Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of the upcoming Beijing Olympics. Coke has been a sponsor of the Olympics since 1928 — the games’ longest running sponsor.

While some of the press pack that was delivered to us along with CokeTag is a little over the top (i.e., “The Coca-Cola Company aligns itself with delivering the promise of a cross-platform Web experience, consistent with Coke’s brand value of bringing people together for social connections across cultures.”), launching a social media application is a smart move. If there’s one thing that Coca-Cola understands, it’s branding — they didn’t become Millward Brown’s #4 brand in the world by accident. And CokeTag is all a about branding.

When Google launched it OpenSocial plan in last year, Tianji.com is the only one from China on the partners list. But we did not hear any news on Tianji’s OpenSocial development. Now CityIn.com, an emerging SNS, announced its OpenSocial-based developer platform, more details can be found here.

However, I’m somewhat skeptical on CityIn’s initiative to adopt OpenSocial at this stage, considering CityIn is still very young, just launched in March, and there is no or few existing Chinese OpenSocial apps in the market. Since CityIn’s user base is quite small now, developers will have no incentives to develop apps on the platform.

CityIn tries to deal with this problem by helping global widget developers to localize their applications, and is talking with some developers privately already. Yes, it is helpful, but only solves part of the problem. We need a big player in China’s SNS market to promote OpenSocial, but I don’t expect big SNS sites in China, such as QQ, 51.com and Baidu Space, will join OpenSocial in near future. Fortunately, we still have MySpace China.

As a key partner of OpenSocial globally, Myspace.com has rolled out the first batch of apps already. In China, MySpace.cn also announced its OpenSocial-based developer platform (MDP) in January 2008, and recently MySpace.cn just launched a MDP apps competition to promote its open platform.

To benefit from user base of MySpace China(anyone knows how big it is?) , we can expect that either foreign language apps will release Chinese version, or more Chinese local startups will start to work on an OpenSocial-compatible widgets, which in turn will benefit other SNS sites with OpenSocial supports, as CityIn.

Adobe is planning to release a security update for Flash Player 9 next month (April 2008). Adobe informed Facebook that this update can potentially break Platform applications that use Flash.

If any of the following situations apply to your application, then your application could be affected by the update.

• You use sockets or XMLSockets, regardless of the domain to which you are connecting
• You use addRequestHeader or URLRequest.requestHeaders in any network API call when sending or loading data cross-domain
• You provide access to content on remote domains as a web service provider
• You have SWFs that are exported for Flash Player 7 (SWF7) or earlier that communicate with the hosting HTML by any means
• You use “javascript:” through network APIs to communicate outside a SWF

This security update also includes the second phase of their implementation for authorizing socket policy files.

You can read the full article about the update at the Adobe site:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/flash_player9_security_update.html

Here something new from Lou Moore, hi5 Director of Engineering.
I’m here to share some exciting news from hi5…
Today we launched a robust new application development platform that enables developers in the OpenSocial community to more easily create, deeply integrate and increase the success of their applications on hi5. As a leading international social network (#1 in over 20 nations), the 8th most-trafficked website in the world, and with less than 25% active user overlap with any of the other leading social networks, hi5 presents a significant growth opportunity for developers’ applications — particularly given the many viral channels we’ve provided to support adoption of your apps. We hope you will contact us soon to get your apps on hi5, or build from scratch on our platform. You can also reach our platform team on this IRC chat channel: irc://irc.freenode.net #hi5dev.

In addition to the platform launch, hi5 also announced today that our company will be joining Yahoo!, MySpace and Google to help establish the OpenSocial Foundation. As many of you know, we have been a proponent of the OpenSocial initiative from the beginning, and are now simply taking our commitment to the next level. We look forward to working with many of you in this endeavor.
In the meantime, we’d like to extend thanks to all of the developers who have been hard at work preparing applications for our platform launch. There are so many that we can’t list them all here, but we sincerely appreciate your contribution! In fact, we are all very excited at hi5 about the many new ways your applications will enable our users to communicate, interact and have fun on hi5, as well as across the social web.

WordPress parent company Automattic got good blog-press today with the hire-acquire of social networking plug-in suite BuddyPress, further indication that the blogging company is preparing to blur the lines in social media and challenge the likes of Facebook and MySpace. The elephant in the middle of the room, though, is data portability and distributed social networking.

Now that there are millions upon millions of dollars in play, is Automattic moving toward a strategy that will prioritize growing its own market share far beyond (and sometimes at the expense of) a broader vision of user-centric social networking?

BuddyPress is a social networking framework built on top of WordPress code and is seen put to use well at ChickSpeak, a social network for hot, vapid sorority “chicks.” It’s a solid social networking code base but doesn’t attempt to solve the fundamental problem with social networks: silos. (”Get me out of LinkedIn and onto ChickSpeak!” the suits are shouting silently.)

Distributed social networking advocates are working to create bridges between different networks so you can take your data from one to the other and back again. Drupal to MySpace to Ning.

After we published our Facebook Application Platform report, we heard from a lot of people. One of them was Shelly Farnham. And like Victor Kiam, the entrepreneur who liked that razor so much he bought the company, we liked Farnham’s ideas so much that we’re publishing her report. With Graphical Social Patterns West going on this week in parallel with ETech, it’s a good time to release the new O’Reilly Radar report, The Facebook Application Ecosystem: Why Some Thrive — and Most Don’t. Stuffed with data, the report shows the application features that lead to success, the best practices for launching and building Facebook applications, why people are using the top Facebook applications, and whether targeting demographics or user interests is a surer way to success. Our original Facebook report showed, for the first time, how Facebook has become a winner-takes-all platform. This new report shows what to do to be among the winners. You can order the report here.