Joel Liu's Library tagged Opensocial →  View Popular

Google FriendConnect is a very important project, and I think many people miss its significance because they don’t fully understand how it works (including the coverage in this blog post, for instance). FriendConnect provides the “Open Stack in a box” to the long-tail of the web–under the hood, it lets any site instantly become an OpenID relying party (something TC has often urged for more of), an OAuth consumer, and an OpenSocial container (meaning they can also now add any 3rd-party OpenSocial gadgets). This will, I believe, have a dramatic impact on the rate at which these open building blocks gain widespread adoption, and ironically it will let the smaller sites leapfrog the larger sites in terms of technical capabilities, because Google is essentially hosting and proxying all of the work needed to support the Open Stack. And Google is going out of their way to provide this functionality in a way that doesn’t give them an unfair advantage–for instance, any FriendConnect user can hook up their Plaxo account, bring in their profile and address book, and share activity back into Pulse, because we support those open standards too. So in conclusion, there’s a lot more to FriendConnect than “OpenSocial’s answer to Facebook”, and anyone who’s a fan of OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, etc., this is definitely something to cheer for.

A developer who goes by the alias “theharmonyguy” and describes himself as “just an amateur” claims to have compromised the RockYou OpenSocial application on Plaxo called emote (see the Plaxo blog for details on the application). Specifically, he claims to have added a number of emoticons to Plaxo VP Marketing John McCrea’s profile within 45 minutes of it launching.