Hello Mr Yellow... I'm an independent webmaster responsible for the development of a handful of small to medium sized websites. I image you are are the same as me relatively speaking. I certainly can't answer all of your questions but I can sure try...
The OpenSocial developer program seems to be fairly developed as far as the mini apps module interface is designed. The actually working functionality of it is debatable and people do seem to be scrambling to patch things up. The purpose of this developer program is to make Encapsulated "games/ widgets/virals" which can easily be distributed throughout all participating social networking groups. There is another group which is almost non-existent called the "container developer group". The fact that the container group is responsible for handling their own server side security issues there will most likely be little on the API documentation side for them ( who ever is in charge of this??? might have a better answer for you )... the client side apps and the data objects are essentially all that need to be defined for someone to reverse engineer... or build a container system to host the applications on their own server to act as host for the widgets... OpenSocial as it stands seems to be a definition of commonly accessible methods which most social networking websites current make use of... The Encapsulated javascripts will be distributed en masse through distribution channels specific to the Google currently supports common GET style interfaces to authenticate and log into the orkut network providing and easy way to by-pass interface scraping techniques. It's rather similar to other Google database driven style apps... ( Google Base ) I imagine each and every social network will be unable to adhere to the same authetication routines any time immediately. I ( possibly just like you ) understand that the ability to authenticate across networks is what is currently seriously lacking from the specifications... hey... who knows... Google is backing this whole thing and right now... all social networks are taking a serious dive due to the huge market shift towards facebook. Even the elite social networks are loosing their long time long time subscribers... OpenSocial appears a last ditch effort by the big guy to unite everyone together... That alone makes me feel warm and fuzzy... Anyways... right now... the intentions seem to be corporate driven... and this platform specifically seems to be a way to get more developers on board specifically for the task of building the functionality into existing social networks... nothing more... I could be interpreting this whole thing incorrectly but this is the general hunch I get after seeing the campfire ,following a few links, and skimming over the documentation... More than anything.. I feel kind of worried for the long nights people might be suffering to get this thing in order... because right now I feel like we are all a part of an analytics system to see if user interest will equate to market growth across the board ( so to speak ) You can rest assured that your OpenSocial apps will remain encapsulated and what you really want to do will be prohibited or more realistically left to the "container developer" to control... Advertising costs money... this is a way to allow people to practice development ( possibly build brand image ) and add functionality to other peoples websites... In long long term it has the possibility to carve out a standards data model for all social networking apps to adhere to.. who knows... I would like to write one app that queries the same variables... I am rather upset that Google chose search?g= and yahoo chose search?q= ... it sucks having to map everything out... if I can query 20 social networking apps for the same information using the same varibales... bonus... BUT right now... I see no evidence of this being possible unless it is accessed directly from the distributed widget hosted within the domain of the "service provider"... maybe they can submit the full spec to the wc3 when they are done... I know this was more of a rant rather than a Q&A but I'm just as new here as you... just sharing what I know... --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OpenSocial Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-api?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
