OpenSocial: An Enabler for Social Applications on the Web

SOCIAL NETWORKING AND interfaces can be seen as representative of two characteristic trends to have emerged in the Web 2.0 era, both of which have evolved in recent years largely independently of each other. A significant portion of our social interaction now takes place on social networks, and URL addressable APIs have become an integral part of the Web.14 The arrival of OpenSocial7,8,13 now heralds a new standard uniting these two trends by defining a set of programming interfaces for developing social applications that are interoperable on different social network sites. Social network sites such as MySpace, Facebook, or XING are all examples of online communities that are technically accommodated through networking software that maps a social graph.1 This enables individual members to create and maintain personal profiles and to manage their connections to other members within a network community (for example, to friends, colleagues, or business contacts). The networking software often permits the sending and receiving of messages via the respective site as well as supporting socalled update feeds that let users know about their contacts' activity within a given network. In the context of social applications, networking sites are referred to as containers. By means of the OpenSocial API, the container grants its applications access to its social graph (such as profile and contact data), as well as to any messaging systems or update feeds. Used by collaborating people, these applications then create a far richer user experience than software that exists outside a social graph context. © 2011 ACM.