Programming Social Applications

Evaluating OpenSocial Container Support

Since OpenSocial is an open source specification for social containers, it has been implemented across many sites with differing levels of integration. This text generally refers to OpenSocial 1.0 or 0.9, so we will focus on containers that support that JavaScript API version. OpenSocial 0.9 contains the same engineering specifications as 1.0, but 1.0 contains new definitions on how to split up the specification to be more applicable to each container environment.

There are a number of containers available that currently implement these JavaScript API specification versions. They are listed in Table 5-1.

Table 5-1. OpenSocial application development containers

Container	OpenSocial version	Developer site
Creyle	0.9	http://developer.creyle.jp/
Cyworld	0.9	http://devsquare.nate.com
Google Friend Connect	0.9	http://code.google.com/apis/friendconnect
GROU.PS	0.9	http://grou.ps/groupsdev
iGoogle	0.9	http://code.google.com/apis/igoogle/
iWiW	0.9	http://dev.iwiw.hu/
MySpace	1.0	http://developer.myspace.com/
XING	0.9	https://www.xing.com/net/opensocialpartner
Yahoo!	0.9	http://developer.yahoo.com/yap
VZ-Netzwerke	0.9	http://www.studivz.net/Developer

These containers have different localization support, depending on their country of origin and user reach.

Many other containers currently implement older versions of the OpenSocial specification, including those listed in Table 5-2.

Table 5-2. Containers implementing older versions of the OpenSocial specification

Container	OpenSocial version ...