OpenSocial: The Power of Social Networks in Your Applications

OpenSocial, 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, one will be able to interact seamlessly with one's orkut communities and friends, write applications that leverage the shared interests with friends on MySpace, and so on.