opensocial

Developers who have created applications for Facebook's platform can now bring them over to social network Friendster. This means that Friendster supports both Facebook's code and OpenSocial, the standard created by Google for social-network widgets.

"Friendster's support of both the Facebook and OpenSocial platforms is a big win for business and individual developers, as well as for Friendster users," David Jones, vice president of global marketing for Friendster, said in a release. "For the developers that have invested resources in developing and launching a Facebook app, Friendster has now made it very easy for … Read more

Social network Hi5 has launched a site translation project, a week after the announcement that the company had created a "crowdsourced translation" app for use on the OpenSocial developer platform and several months after it initially announced plans for translation.

The site is now available not only in American English and the two dozen languages that Hi5 had previously translated it into (not through community efforts), but now also in Catalan, Danish, British English, Finnish, Hindi, Macedonian, Slovakian, Mexican Spanish, Colombian Spanish, and Swedish. These translations were generated by community participation and verified by translation service Lionbridge. Later … Read more

Social network Hi5 plans to announce on Thursday that it has built a developer application with the Google-created OpenSocial standard that "crowdsources" language translation.

This makes it possible for OpenSocial-compatible social networks or applications to let their users work to translate a site or application's text and interface into more languages, in turn making it easier for the service to have broader geographic reach. The translation app will be implemented on Hi5, a social network that was founded in San Francisco but is most popular in Spanish-speaking countries, as well as its own developer platform, and is … Read more

Social networks are designed to be all about friends, right? Yet when it comes to the competition behind the scenes at social networks, I'm reminded of the '70s song by War, "Why can't we be friends?"

That song especially comes to mind with Google's OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit that was officially established this week to promote the open developer platform OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a common set of application protocol interfaces (APIs) for social networks. It's designed to make it easy for companies to create a social network or related applications and have them work … Read more

On November 1, 2007, Google launched OpenSocial, a set of APIs that leverage JavaScript and HTML for creating applications that access friends and update feeds from any compliant social network. Nearly 10 months later, Google is touting the maturation of the OpenSocial specification and growing developer and user adoption.

At this juncture OpenSocial version 0.7 has an addressable market of more than 300 million social network users, including the social networks that have delivered OpenSocial applications or are actively developing them, according to Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management. Friendster, which claims 75 million users including 55 … Read more

Over the weekend, poll-making tool PollDaddy quietly released a new OpenSocial app called PollDaddy Jr. It's got all of PollDaddy's features squeezed into a "mini app" (not to be confused with a widget) that can travel the rounds to any OpenSocial-ready network.

I gave the app a spin on Hi5 and MySpace, and both offer the same experience of building polls like you would on PollDaddy's own site, but nested within the confines of the social network instead.

What may be more interesting is the chat I had with PollDaddy founder David Lenehan. Lenehan says … Read more

What does the iPhone 3G have to do with the future of social platforms like Facebook and OpenSocial? A lot, actually.

It's because of the iPhone App Store, the add-on to the iTunes Store that opened its doors on Thursday in anticipation of the new device and its iPhone 2.0 software.

With more than 550 third-party applications available at launch, Apple's new mini marketplace means that for the first time since the social-application craze started more than a year ago, the hottest new trend has nothing to do with Web-based networks.

"(The iPhone is) a device … Read more

Google users are starting to see an updated interface to the iGoogle home page, according to the Google Operating System blog.

iGoogle lets users select various modules such as mail, photos, games, or a to-do list; it competes chiefly with My Yahoo but also with sites from rivals including Netvibes and PageFlakes.

As expected, the revamped iGoogle provides a navigation bar on the left edge of the screen that lets users select iGoogle gadgets and perform other functions. Another feature could mean more dramatic changes to the site, though: a "canvas view" that lets gadgets fill up the whole page also will permit ads on iGoogle. … Read more

AOL will officially support OpenSocial, the developer standard created by Google for social-networking applications. The announcement was hinted at by Google Director of Engineering David Glazer in a speech at the Google I/O conference Wednesday.

The online service-turned-media brand will join pretty much every big player in online media that isn't Facebook: MySpace and Yahoo, for example, were major partners when Google spun OpenSocial off into its own nonprofit organization.

It's not a surprise: Bebo, the social network acquired by AOL earlier this year, already supports OpenSocial, and is being tightly integrated into other AOL communication properties … Read more