Mainfram Reality

Open social is a google initive, designed to offer a common API for social network based applications while allowing developers to easily write applications for any social network participating in the Open Social initiative.

Many sites, one API
Common APIs mean you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

More online applications and websites are joining the Open Social initiative, but so far facebook.com has not joined yet.

The potential an open standard like Open social has on growing the online application market is enormous.

Below are some references, get started guides, etc.

• Official Site at code.google.com
• Google Code – Getting Started Guide
• Open Social FAQ

Since I couldn’t figure out what my first Facebook application should do, I decided to make a Facebook application that asks Facebook users what the “Ultimate Facebook Application” should be.

http://apps.facebook.com/ultimate-app-dev/
Have a look, let me know what you think.

Big thanks to Bradley, for not thinking I was crazy.

I’ve been looking into writing Facebook applications using Ruby on Rails. Below are a few useful posts and sites.

• Facebook for Ruby blog
  • This post especially: 10-Minute Quick Start Guide for Facebooker – Create a Facebook App Using Rails in 7 Easy Steps
    
• Friends for Sale Architecture – A 300 Million Page View/Month Facebook RoR App by Todd Hoff
• Facebooker, Ruby wrapper over the Facebook REST API
• Facebook Developer Site

If anyone has any other resource, please comment and I will add them.