Utah Open Source Planet

I’ve been contemplating for awhile now a good way to share what I know about Social Software Development and helping business owners, marketers, and developers learn how to set up their own social apps. Especially for developers, I know there are many out there looking for howtos and ways to learn more about starting their own App, promoting it, and getting it off the ground. As the author of FBML Essentials, I feel I am well suited for the task so in the next few days I’m going to start doing howtos and overviews on how you can get your own Apps together. If you’re “the business type”, I may get a little technical on you, but I do recommend you keep watching and forward these onto your IT personell - your CIO, CTO, and the like should read these so they can learn what’s possible to integrate into your existing environments. I’ll also try to throw in a little goodie here and there for “the business type”.

So, I’ve created a new category to the right, “Social Coding” - if you want to track just that, click on the category name and add it to your RSS. I’ve also started a new FriendFeed Room where those involved or that want to get involved in Social Coding can discuss, learn, and talk with each other. You can subscribe to that here.

Let’s start by going over the types of sites I could cover. Here are just a few - let me know if you have a particular interest in learning about how to code for any one in particular:

• Facebook
• OpenSocial
• Google Friend Connect
• Twitter
• FriendFeed
• Pligg
• Digg
• LinkedIn
• MySpace
• Wordpress
• MoveableType
• Google App Engine
• Bungee Connect

Stay tuned! I’ll keep posting news and other rants as we go forward - I’ll just be adding in some good howtos at the same time. Oh, and if you’re a developer and would like to do a howto in your preferred language for us, contact me - I’d love to let you do a guest post.

When I first read about Google Friend Connect, an upcoming service that will allow website owners to easily add social network functionality to their own websites, I immediately thought of these lines from NBC’s “The Office”:

Dwight: Why am I being forced to come in tomorrow and pretend that a website made sales that I made?
Ryan: This is a temporary measure to increase the legitimacy of the site.
Stanley: I don’t like when my clients call me to help them use the website, I’m not seeing commissions on that.
Ryan: I hear you Stanley, that is a great observation. Problems like that will not happen when we launch Dunder Mifflin Infinity 2 point O.
Stanley: When will that be?
Ryan: TBD. Phyllis?
Phyllis: Did the police solve the problem with the…
Ryan: Yes, yes they did, yes they did.
Ryan: Yes, the social networking feature of the Dunder Mifflin Infinity website was infiltrated by sexual predators.
Dwight: I don’t understand why our website has to have social networking at all.
Jim: Yeah, I actually have to agree with Dwight on that one.
Ryan: It’s all about creating a one stop shop consumer experience, alright? You’re chatting with your friends, you’re talking about the latest music, about the election; all of it is happening in our virtual paper store.
Jim: And then an older gentleman asked you “Boxers or briefs?”
Creed: I don’t get the big fuss here, I like the site.
Kelly: If I’d have created a website with as many problems, I’d kill myself.
Ryan: Do you have a question Kelly?
Kelly: Yeah I have a lot of questions. Number one, how dare you?
Michael: [slow clapping] Ryan has done a very good job, and I am not applauding sarcastically. Think about it, a month ago nobody would go on this site because we were worried about getting molested, or losing our identity, having it stolen. But now, at a time TBD, all of the problems will be in the past. Ya done good kid, ya done good.
– Source: OfficeQuotes.net

I thought all this was pretty funny, but the ability to drop social features onto your website with little more than some pasting of JavaScript might just prove us all wrong.  :)

Example:

3 of your friends liked SemiGloss Oxford White Cardstock #80.  Click here to get new friends!

Charlene Li, and Josh Bernoff are two of my favorite Social Media Experts. They published “Groundswell”, a book I strongly suggest and recommend to anyone looking to utilize social technology in their business strategy. Here are my notes:

Key roles and their Groundswell objectives:

• Research
• Marketing
• Sales
• Support
• Development

Charlene talking about specific applications that accomplish these objectives:

Del Monte community, invitation only, has conversations with their customers. Del Monte asks their customers questions like, “What does your dog eat for breakfast” and gets responses back from the customers. Then, more specific questions are asked, and a conversation is started. This information is hard to measure in a focus group, but can be gathered via a Groundswell.

Now Charlene’s talking about tampons. What, don’t like the subject? Neither do most people. P&G had this same problem, and created the social network, “Being Girl”. No branding of “P&G” on the site. In articles, adds things like, “Brought to you by Always pads”.

Brides.com: Allows the bride-to-be to create a count-down calendar on their Myspace page. Widget shows the countdown, and offers a challenge to get the widget. When a user clicks to get the widget, they go to brides.com to get the widget. With widgets like this, your fans are doing the selling for you.

Starbucks: Suggestion boxes. All suggestions are public, and can be voted by the community. Management talks back to the community and responds to their feedback!

Keys to success for pragmatists:

• Start with your customers
• Choose an objective you can measure
• Line up executive backing
• Romance the naysayers
• Start small, think big

Pragmatists bring companies and the groundswell together. Objectives are the key to successful social strategy. Use POST to frame your strategy. Think big, but start small.

Unfortunately I only have a Flip which gives me just 30 minutes of storage so you’ll be able to see the first 30 minutes below. I’m currently watching “Comparing Social Platforms”, with Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager for Facebook, Allen Hurff, SVP Engineering for Myspace, Jessica Alter, Dir. of Platform and Business Development for Bebo, Patrick Chanezon, Google OpenSocial Evangelist, and David Recordon, Open Platform Lead for Six Apart. It’s fascinating to see the leaders of all 4 areas, including a developer standpoint from Six Apart all talking about ways to improve the Social Graph.

I’ll continue from where the video left off:

Allen Hurff said a great point when it comes to focus on Platform Development: “I love developers, but I love users ten times more”. That’s a great point and something we need to remember, and not be too demanding on as developers. In the end it’s all about the users of our applications.

Dave Morin talked about the Causes application. If the user can’t get the message to the friends that they care about such a cause, that’s bad and needs to be taken care of. Facebook is trying to focus on this, while finding balance with Applications that perhaps aren’t as impacting to ensure they aren’t being spammy and user experience is protected.

Patrick Chanezon says Google prefers the term “organic growth” to “viral growth”. Dave Morin brought up that ultimately, creating the best product is the end goal. Those applications that just focus on Viral growth grow fast, but ultimately die out. In the end you want the best experience for the user.

Dave Morin: “A lot of the times we’ll see viral but no ’social’”. Being able to see what your friends are doing with your application, how they interact together makes it social and not just viral.

Dave Morin: Social Commerce is the future of how people do business on the web. Working on a commerce engine for Facebook. He likes the applications that are doing virtual currencies (I agree).

David Recordon: Building applications has to be easy. Extensibility is important. It has to be easier than it is today - if more successful than today next year, technology still isn’t easy enough.

Questions:

• Matt from SocialThing: will there ever be a premium model with guaranteed uptime, extended support, etc.?: Myspace says they haven’t thought of it. Facebook says they are committed to their platform - says it’s a good point and also haven’t thought of it.
• How liberal are platforms going to be in sharing data?: Six Apart is one of the creators of the ATOM standard - bloggers should own their content. Facebook is committed to enabling people to take data where they want to. What exactly does “data portability” mean? Dave Morin posed that question to OpenSocial… “data portability” might not be the right word for it - “privacy portability” might be a better term for it. “It’s all about the user - it’s not about technology.”
• What are the thoughts on creating an even playing field for viral channels?: Myspace will have a hard time

In conclusion it looks like the theme for this was putting focus on the users in the end vision, not the application. I’ll upload the video in a minute if it isn’t showing yet.

I’ll be at Web 2.0 Expo starting tomorrow, April 22 through Friday, April 25. This, in my opinion, is one of the conferences to be at this year, as I really feel we’re getting to a tipping point towards the evolution of Social Networks. Expect to hear a lot about Enterprise 2.0, Future of Mobile, and of course, the future of Social Networks. I’ll do my best to live-blog what I can on the Stay N’ Alive blog, OpensocialNow.com, and FacebookAdvice.com. I’ll be bringing along my wife’s Flip digital video camera so maybe I’ll even get some good video while I’m out there.

I’ll be bringing several signed copies (by both me and Jason) of “I’m on Facebook–Now What???” with me, which, if you’re a blogger and can convince me why I should give you a free copy (I love giveaways to your audience if you have a good audience) come see me. Or, if you already have a copy of the book I’m happy to sign copies while I’m there. I’ll be posting my whereabouts on Twitter so you should be able to find me. Also, look for me at the O’Reilly booth on Wednesday around 3pm. I’ll be also promoting my upcoming book, FBML Essentials and would love to meet you!

If you want to follow where I am, again, there’s Twitter, or feel free to check out my schedule here. Also, add me on Crowdvine!

Today Yahoo announced that they are joining forces with the OpenSocial platform, and will be joining both Google and MySpace to build “The OpenSocial Foundation”. This new foundation “will seek to ensure that the technology behind OpenSocial remains implementable by all, freely and without restriction, in perpetuity.” It is modeled after the current industry-supported OpenID foundation. As an addition to that announcement, Google has released “opensocial.org” to promote the development of OpenSocial on a standard platform away from the Google environment.

Read more about it over at OpensocialNow!

After meeting up with Bess Ho, founder of the Silicon Valley Web Builders and Facebook Developers Garage, we decided a joint hackathon, focusing on OpenSocial would be a great opportunity for both of our groups. So I’m proud to announce that next week, March 26, from 8pm MST to 1am MST the Utah Social Media Developers Group (formerly Utah Facebook Developers Garage) will be joining with the Silicon Valley Web Builders live via Ustream.tv and Qik for a great night of OpenSocial hacking!

We’ll kick off the event with a presentation by Jason McGowan, lead developer at the Facebook App, We’re Related. He’s going to talk about some of the work they’re doing on OpenSocial. We’ll follow that with a presentation by Ted Haeger, Director of Developer Relations at Bungee Labs. I’m told he’s going to show us some cool new features of the Bungee Labs developer tools that integrate with OpenSocial, in a 15 minute timeframe. Bungee Labs will be hosting the event and providing snacks and drinks. Here’s Ted’s Bio:

Ted Haeger directs Bungee Connect’s developer program and leads Bungee Labs’ team of evangelists. An avid technologist, Ted is keenly interested in the rapidly evolving social dynamics and changes to human culture coming about as the Internet continues to develop. Prior to his work at Bungee Labs, Ted directed the open source advocacy program for Novell. He still keeps strong ties to friends throughout Free Software community and regularly speaks at various international and regional open source events.

The rest of the night will be spent just hacking and coding on OpenSocial, with the help of other developers there in both Utah and Silicon Valley to help getting started and continuing your development in OpenSocial. Both Google and RockYou have generously offered to provide Swag for the event (MySpace was offered the opportunity, but supposedly they “have already met their goals for the number of developers on their platform”. MySpace - the offer is still out there if you want it!). Thanks to them for their generous help in getting this event together. So the evening should be full of education, swag, snacks, and coding, a developer’s dream! If you’re a business that would also like to offer some Swag or something else contact me and we’ll add your name to the Sponsors list!

So if you’re a developer already or looking to develop in Social applications in Google’s Open Source platform, OpenSocial, come on over and code with us! Those interested in meeting developers are also invited. Bungee Labs, Google, RockYou, and my Social Media Applications Agency, SocialOptimize, will be Sponsoring the event.

Before coming don’t forget to sign up for the sandboxes you are interested in developing on - they often take a few days to get approved. You can find links to those environments here. Be sure to check out the tutorial here.

An interesting Fact - based on comparing numbers with Bess in Silicon Valley, it appears that Utah has the largest group of Social Media developers next to Silicon Valley on the West Coast. Our Facebook Group actually has more than they do! Let’s all get together and show the developers in Silicon Valley what Utah is all about! Please be sure to RSVP for the event on Upcoming or Facebook (join our group there!). You can find directions to Bungee Labs here:

625 E Technology Ave B2300
Orem, UT 84097

I’m proud to announce a new website I’ve been working on.  You may have heard me Twitter about it a few times.  The site is called OpensocialNow!, and will be your source for OpenSocial News, Reviews, and info.  We’ll cover the Orkut launch, the Myspace launch, Hi5, and LinkedIn, as well as general things you can do with OpenSocial.  This is the first blog of its kind, and as OpenSocial launches in the next week or two I’m sure you’ll see many more like it.  It’s my hope that you’ll subscribe to the site via rss and make it your Official source for all things related to the popular social networking platform, OpenSocial.  You can read more about it right on the website here:

http://opensocialnow.com/2008/02/26/welcome-to-opensocialnow/

Oh, and stay tuned to OpensocialNow.com.  I have one more big announcement about a change in the OpenSocial launch coming up tonight!

Did you know Amazon has a Social Network?  In fact, it’s pretty robust!  In Amazon, if you click “(your name)’s Amazon”, then “Your Profile”, you have the option to set up a profile, including a biography, information about yourself, and get this - a list of all your friends currently on Amazon.com. It can show your recent purchases, your favorite items, your wish list, and more. It even gives you a blog in which you can send messages to those that are friends with you. You can also import your own blog’s rss into the blog feed. Amazon has even MySpace beat, with an activity feed of recent activity by your friends.

The real power comes for authors. As an author, I can have people add me as a friend, and I can keep an open dialog with my readers. I can introduce deals, notify when new editions of the book are released, and more. You can see my favorite books, movies, and music, my wishlist, and my biography. You can also see the other books I have written. Amazon also lets you verify through a publisher or agent that a book was written by you, so your books on Amazon can link back to your profile.

Amazon has quite a tool here that I wouldn’t put past them building on in the future. If you think the MySpace OpenSocial announcement was big, imagine if Amazon were to embrace an API such as OpenSocial. In the USA alone, Amazon has over 60 million members in its network. Each one of those members is tied to a bank account of some sort and has probably bought something at some point from the site. Add to that the existing APIs Amazon provides, allowing users to query the Amazon database, associate affiliate IDs and sell items based on commission, Amazon could have the first proven revenue model for a Social Network.

Amazon and Google aren’t the best of friends. Would Amazon embrace Google’s OpenSocial, or create their own as they have through Amazon AWS? Visit my Profile and add me as a friend on Amazon!:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1NYWKPQAI1F5R

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It used to be, one could make a deal on just a handshake.  People could leave their doors unlocked on their homes and their cars without worry of break in.  A man’s word was his bond.  Everyone knew everyone, by name.

This wasn’t the world I grew up in, but I’m told by my Grandparents, and I’ve seen stories of ancestors where this was, at one time, the way things were done in the world.  We just trusted each other back then.

You see, back then, communities were much smaller.  In the days when trust was in its prime, everyone did know each other by name, because they could know each other by name.  Communities were much smaller back then and accommodated this lifestyle much easier.  Crime was much harder to commit because everyone in the town knew you, and you knew them.  Think, the Scarlet Letter - the worst punishment of that time was shame.  There was no anonymity.  There was no privacy.

Sound familiar?  We are quickly overcoming the bonds of large society which put us in this untrustworthy time to live.  The internet came at a time when society wasn’t ready to be exposed.  People enjoyed their anonymity and their sheltered lives.  They were used to contracts, and handshakes never meant what they used to.  Society fought the internet, and it appears, finally, the internet is fighting back.

Social Media is bringing back an era which we thought we would never see again.  People are being held responsible for their actions online, and again, communities are getting much smaller.   Now, circles of friends can virtually know everything about each other, know each other by name, and start to trust each other again.

I argue, the lack of privacy in Social Media is a good thing.  When you know who your friends are, you can build trust with them again.  Contracts are no longer necessary, and back is the handshake and word as a bond.  Small Community has been re-architected through a virtual means which no one saw coming.

Now, imagine the cell phone, when virtual lives become melded with real life.  Virtual “small communities” become real, and back again is the small town, weaved into the fabric of a very large Society.  Social Media is bringing back the days when man could actually trust one another!

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It appears I spoke too soon.  About 5 minutes ago Google announced Orkut will launch their applications to all users the last week in February.  I was close - an announcement was made, and they will be launching OpenSocial 0.7 tomorrow, the same day MySpace opens to developers.  In essence, OpenSocial is going live tomorrow.  It just won’t be visible to the public until the last week in February.  It appears, as I said, Google had to have the last word.

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As I mentioned earlier, I think the MySpace launch is way bigger than just MySpace.  Watch carefully tomorrow.  There have been several announcements at Google that hint that you may just see Orkut go live tomorrow as well.  From the Release Notes for the latest version of OpenSocial (0.7), under Orkut container update:

 ”Close for gadget whitelist submission Feb 5″

I’m not quite sure what this fully means, other than it looks like things are finishing up for Orkut tomorrow.  Also, today Google released a blog post, of which they stated:

The best news is that, based on numerous discussions with both app developers as well as container sites, we believe OpenSocial 0.7 has all the necessary pieces to launch OpenSocial apps to users at scale. In fact, both hi5 and orkut will be using OpenSocial 0.7 for their upcoming user-facing launches.

On the mailing list today (just 6 hours ago), an Orkut developer stated:

We haven’t pushed v0.7 yet, but we’re planning to do it soon.  In the
meantime, use feature=”opensocial-0.6″ and I’ll post when v0.7 is
live.

It’s looking like 0.7 is soon to go live “soon”, and will more than likely with it, make it very possible for sites like Orkut who have been in testing for so long to go live with it (rather than just a developer sandbox like it has now).  MySpace itself will release in a sandbox for about a month on it (I just got word MySpace has officially launched to developers).  Is Orkut getting ready to do a one-up on MySpace tomorrow?

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The past 2 days I had the opportunity to join the Google OpenSocial developer team, along with other Silicon Valley and nationwide developers to celebrate the soon-to-be launched Orkut release to the public of OpenSocial apps at the Googleplex in San Francisco. The event started with an overview of OpenSocial, and went over some of the resources available to OpenSocial developers as well as a quick, “Hello World” example of an OpenSocial app on Orkut.Following that, it was up to the developers to code away, chat and meet with each other, ask the Google OpenSocial development team questions, and move forward, very fast on their apps. The goal was that by the end of the day, your OpenSocial application would be in a state, with the encouragement and approval of the OpenSocial team to be submitted to the Orkut directory. Those submitted yesterday would be available upon launch of the OpenSocial directory. (yesterday was the deadline for those to be included at launch, but you will continue to be able to submit throughout the launch)

While there, I was able to meet Adam Glickman, notorious for following perhaps the most people on Twitter, at 7000 (Adam, I should note that I have you beat in number of updates!). I also met, and chatted for a bit with Bess Ho, founder of the Silicon Valley Facebook Developers Garage, the Silicon Valley Web Builders, and a very strong evangelist and organizer of Social Media events in the Silicon Valley area. She was there developing her own app. We talked about collaborating further on some events between Silicon Valley and Utah in the future (stay tuned!).

The big buzz around the event was how one could better migrate a Facebook app to OpenSocial. One person pointed me to OpenSocket, which is intended to be code you can install on your Facebook app, essentially making it a container for OpenSocial code. So, in the future, ideally you would write your code in OpenSocial, and when you’re ready to port to Facebook you would simply place it on top of the OpenSocket container. I think you’ll see more things like this as OpenSocial launches. I’ll talk more on my opinions of why Facebook will need to implement OpenSocial in some capacity in a later post.

What I was most impressed with, is that with all those developing applications for OpenSocial, the theme for the hackathon was simplicity. Every single app demo’d that was going to launch on launch day was extremely simple, with plans to build on it further down the road. There were former Facebook developers, Google Gadget developers looking to make their gadgets more viral, as well as people completely new to developing for the social scene which demo’d their apps for the rest of us. I saw a drag and drop “Top Friends”-type app which will be called, ironically, “Facebook”. OpenSocial is really cool in that, because of Caja, you have much more flexibility with your Javascript than Facebook. Facebook (the site, not the app) should really look to implement Caja into their apps to keep security, while allowing flexibility within the app. Another group of guys from Idaho and Utah were developing a “date ideas” app. Some other guys were developing a really cool slide show app with some neat viral twists. It was also fun to see the mashup of different other Google APIs into the OpenSocial APIs. Each presenter got to take home a very cool OpenSocial T-shirt.

The event ended with a really great presentation from the project lead of the OpenSocial team - you might remember him as the Indian guy from the Campfire video at the OpenSocial launch. He showed User Experience and UI from a Google experience, with some really great tips on how to make your apps better. He suggested using the Orkut locality settings to set everything to a different language, and then seeing if you can navigate your app in a language you can’t understand. He also suggested breaking up your app - if it is 2 different ideas in one robust app, he suggested breaking it up into 2 different apps. He had some very interesting tips that I’ll try to incorporate into my own apps.

As for what I did? I wrote an app that allows you to track a group of people geographically close to you, send updates back and forth to that group, organize and collaborate, and find more people that are geographically close to you. I call it the, “Know Your Neighbor” app. I demo’d it at the end of yesterday, and got my cool T-Shirt to take home. Everyone had great response, so I have hopes it could be a hit. Then I submitted the app to the Orkut directory (ironically, Google uses the same “forms” system I talked about earlier for the app submission process. They are just collecting the app submission data in a Google spreadsheet somewhere), of which it will appear on the day of launch.

Look for the “Know Your Neighborhood” app on Orkut when it launches! As the other platforms launch I will be rolling it out to those platforms as well. SocialOptimize, my Social Media Development and Consulting Agency does OpenSocial development too - look us up if you would like some help building an OpenSocial strategy at your company!

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Did you know Amazon has a Social Network?  In fact, it’s pretty robust!  In Amazon, if you click “(your name)’s Amazon”, then “Your Profile”, you have the option to set up a profile, including a biography, information about yourself, and get this - a list of all your friends currently on Amazon.com. It can show your recent purchases, your favorite items, your wish list, and more. It even gives you a blog in which you can send messages to those that are friends with you. You can also import your own blog’s rss into the blog feed. Amazon has even MySpace beat, with an activity feed of recent activity by your friends.

The real power comes for authors. As an author, I can have people add me as a friend, and I can keep an open dialog with my readers. I can introduce deals, notify when new editions of the book are released, and more. You can see my favorite books, movies, and music, my wishlist, and my biography. You can also see the other books I have written. Amazon also lets you verify through a publisher or agent that a book was written by you, so your books on Amazon can link back to your profile.

Amazon has quite a tool here that I wouldn’t put past them building on in the future. If you think the MySpace OpenSocial announcement was big, imagine if Amazon were to embrace an API such as OpenSocial. In the USA alone, Amazon has over 60 million members in its network. Each one of those members is tied to a bank account of some sort and has probably bought something at some point from the site. Add to that the existing APIs Amazon provides, allowing users to query the Amazon database, associate affiliate IDs and sell items based on commission, Amazon could have the first proven revenue model for a Social Network.

Amazon and Google aren’t the best of friends. Would Amazon embrace Google’s OpenSocial, or create their own as they have through Amazon AWS? Visit my Profile and add me as a friend on Amazon!:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1NYWKPQAI1F5R

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It used to be, one could make a deal on just a handshake.  People could leave their doors unlocked on their homes and their cars without worry of break in.  A man’s word was his bond.  Everyone knew everyone, by name.

This wasn’t the world I grew up in, but I’m told by my Grandparents, and I’ve seen stories of ancestors where this was, at one time, the way things were done in the world.  We just trusted each other back then.

You see, back then, communities were much smaller.  In the days when trust was in its prime, everyone did know each other by name, because they could know each other by name.  Communities were much smaller back then and accommodated this lifestyle much easier.  Crime was much harder to commit because everyone in the town knew you, and you knew them.  Think, the Scarlet Letter - the worst punishment of that time was shame.  There was no anonymity.  There was no privacy.

Sound familiar?  We are quickly overcoming the bonds of large society which put us in this untrustworthy time to live.  The internet came at a time when society wasn’t ready to be exposed.  People enjoyed their anonymity and their sheltered lives.  They were used to contracts, and handshakes never meant what they used to.  Society fought the internet, and it appears, finally, the internet is fighting back.

Social Media is bringing back an era which we thought we would never see again.  People are being held responsible for their actions online, and again, communities are getting much smaller.   Now, circles of friends can virtually know everything about each other, know each other by name, and start to trust each other again.

I argue, the lack of privacy in Social Media is a good thing.  When you know who your friends are, you can build trust with them again.  Contracts are no longer necessary, and back is the handshake and word as a bond.  Small Community has been re-architected through a virtual means which no one saw coming.

Now, imagine the cell phone, when virtual lives become melded with real life.  Virtual “small communities” become real, and back again is the small town, weaved into the fabric of a very large Society.  Social Media is bringing back the days when man could actually trust one another!

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It appears I spoke too soon.  About 5 minutes ago Google announced Orkut will launch their applications to all users the last week in February.  I was close - an announcement was made, and they will be launching OpenSocial 0.7 tomorrow, the same day MySpace opens to developers.  In essence, OpenSocial is going live tomorrow.  It just won’t be visible to the public until the last week in February.  It appears, as I said, Google had to have the last word.

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As I mentioned earlier, I think the MySpace launch is way bigger than just MySpace.  Watch carefully tomorrow.  There have been several announcements at Google that hint that you may just see Orkut go live tomorrow as well.  From the Release Notes for the latest version of OpenSocial (0.7), under Orkut container update:

 ”Close for gadget whitelist submission Feb 5″

I’m not quite sure what this fully means, other than it looks like things are finishing up for Orkut tomorrow.  Also, today Google released a blog post, of which they stated:

The best news is that, based on numerous discussions with both app developers as well as container sites, we believe OpenSocial 0.7 has all the necessary pieces to launch OpenSocial apps to users at scale. In fact, both hi5 and orkut will be using OpenSocial 0.7 for their upcoming user-facing launches.

On the mailing list today (just 6 hours ago), an Orkut developer stated:

We haven’t pushed v0.7 yet, but we’re planning to do it soon.  In the meantime, use feature=”opensocial-0.6″ and I’ll post when v0.7 is live.

It’s looking like 0.7 is soon to go live “soon”, and will more than likely with it, make it very possible for sites like Orkut who have been in testing for so long to go live with it (rather than just a developer sandbox like it has now).  MySpace itself will release in a sandbox for about a month on it (I just got word MySpace has officially launched to developers).  Is Orkut getting ready to do a one-up on MySpace tomorrow?

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Tonight, MySpace released a signup to enter their development platform. Mashable is reporting that the Platform will go live February 5, and will support OpenSocial from day 1. The MySpace Platform is also rumored to provide revenue sharing options for developers, perhaps providing a solution to the ad sharing networks becoming so rampant on Facebook today.

However, I think the really big news is that MySpace is talking about actually launching their platform on February 5. I have yet to hear that it will be a beta like all the other networks currently. OpenSocial is currently at version 0.7, so that means they are nearing production. Does this mean OpenSocial will officially be out of beta by February 5? I think this could very well be the case, and possibly the reason for MySpace’s late entry - expect this to happen very soon.

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