OpenSocial hackathons happening throughout APAC

What an exciting couple of weeks it's going to be for OpenSocial in Asia Pacific.

This weekend, there will be 3 OpenSocial hackathons happening simultaneously in Vietnam, Singapore, and Australia. Organizers are expecting the combined attendance of all three hackathons to be 100 developers. The emphasis for the events in Hanoi and Singapore will be on creating applications to be submitted to the OpenSocial contest for Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, the hackathon in Australia will focus on creating iGoogle applications, then throwing in the social elements. Big thanks to eXo Platform, WebPal Networks, and e27 for all of their help in organizing these hackathons. Unfortunately, the Singapore event is closed for signups. If you'd like to register for the Sydney event or the Hanoi event, please be aware that space is extremely limited so sign up quickly! The organizers will do their best to accommodate as many people as possible. More details on the agenda for each country can be found here for Vietnam, Singapore, and Australia.

Next week, Google China will be hosting OpenSocial hackathons in Beijing (12/16) and Shanghai (12/18). Space is extremely limited and filling up fast, so if you're in China and want to join us for either of these two events, please register here. We'll spend the mornings talking through application demos, code samples, container updates, and then we'll dive into coding. During the evenings, we'll see an overview of branded application opportunities from Mentez, plus a presentation from Google's AdSense team. Mentez is a partner company working towards the promotion and development of successful Internet applications, mainly geared towards social networks.

In China, we're looking forward to seeing attendees develop high quality OpenSocial applications for leading social networking sites in China such as MySpace.cn, Xiaonei, 51.com, YiQi.com, and Tianya. There will also be quick updates of OpenSocial support from those same leading sites, followed by topics of interest to all developers such as best practices for Chinese and foreign app developers, monetization opportunities, consulting partnership, and hosting solutions. The hackathons will last from 9:30am to 8pm (or later), culminating in a contest to determine the best apps, as voted on by participating developers. First prize winners will receive an iPod Touch.

There will also be an OpenSocial hackathon for developers in Japan on 12/18. If you'd like to register, you can do so here. This event will feature OpenSocial partners MySpace Japan and Recruit. The goal for this event is to prototype high quality applications for the Japanese market.

It's really exciting to see both OpenSocial's adoption in Asia, as well as tremendous interest from developers to make the web more open and more social.


Jason Costa & Shawn Shen, Developer Relations, OpenSocial