Yesterday was a long day. The long flight from Helsinki to San Francisco via Frankfurt wasn’t really enjoyable, but the OpenThread made up for that. OpenThread was an OpenSocial developer event organized by SocialMedia and held at their unique office in SF.
The event opened by overview of OpenSocial by Lane LiaBraaten from Google and continued with Paul Lindner from Hi5 giving an excellent hands-on tutorial on writing the first basic OpenSocial app. The crowd consisted of developers so the discussion frequently went to more into details. Somebody was asking Paul about a Hi5 specific problem where his app was having problems with the 5s time-out from Hi5. Paul was quick to reply that he can change it to 8s if that helps – how is that for supporting developers. OpenSocial is currently moving into v0.8 which is promising to give even more tools for developers to write rich and connected apps. One of the main ideas behind OpenSocial is to unify development across the different Social Networking sites. Currently the status seems to be “learn once, use everywhere.”
The following panel discussion revealed that the main problem currently in writing to a new container is to learn which viral channels to use and what and how the users like to use them. So it seems that OpenSocial is getting close to the goal. The discussion seem to concentrated also much around what kind of apps would be the top apps in years to come (are we still pinching and poking)? Some offered that it might be those apps that can be monetized – which still seems to be very difficult. A few claimed that they were profitable by using micropayments and many agreed that there is a difference between the different geographical areas when it comes to monetization.
In the end, I started thinking that as OpenSocial has persistence features and furthermore provides developers methods to make requests to their own servers through the container, it might be possible to write a full-fledged social network spanning over all existing OpenSocial sites. It would not matter where your users are originally logged in, they could still participate in your network. However, you would probably need to provide server capability and therefore the monetization comes to play an important part again.
The night ended with SUN sponsored OpenBar and some interesting discussions. Unfortunately I had to retire quite early after the long day. Overall, it was a good meeting, so if you have chance to visit future OpenSocial meet-ups, just go!
