OpenSocial: The Power of Social Networks in Your Applications

penSocial, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) based on standard HTML and JavaScript, simplifies the creation of web-based applications that interact with social networks. Launched by Google in November 2007, the OpenSocial APIs are supported (or in the process of being adopted) by a number of different social networks, such as orkut, MySpace, Yahoo! , hi5, and Friendster. Thanks to such broad support, a developer has to learn the APIs only once to be able to contribute applications to all these different social networks. Through OpenSocial, you will be able to interact seamlessly with your orkut communities and friends, write applications that leverage your shared interests with your friends on MySpace, and so on.

This article will guide you through the OpenSocial APIs and show you how to build a couple of social applications to share interests with friends. Figure 1 and Figure 2 show the final results: two applications, loaded within the orkut container to share travel experiences and movie preferences with a network of friends.