OpenSocial development – the beginning

Social Networking platform

I’ve started to look at OpenSocial as a solution for my Social Networking site, as usual I’m finding documentation on these things hard to come by. I hate being an early adopter f things, too many dead ends. Having said that it has been around for a couple of years. The idea of OpenSocial is to provide a common platform/API for developers to develop mini applications that your network users can plug into their profiles.

This is a big rival of Facebooks Platform, so far I’ve installed shindig http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/ successfully and set up my developers sub domain. The next stage is proving to be a little tricky, integrating my existing MySQL database into shindig and develop an API for developers to plug into. There isn’t a huge amount of info on this but there is an example network that I’ve downloaded and begun to play with, so hopefully not too many sleepless nights ahead, I will keep you posted!

I’m now looking at the next steps via this post http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-container/browse_thread/thread/231b48dbc4eaa1a8# to customise partuza (the text platform) http://www.partuza.nl/

I need to get this turned around fairly quick and hopefully can use some of the API in my iPhone App which I hope to launch before Christmas.