OpenSocial Hackathon in Australia, Singapore and Vietnam

Following the success of last year's first ever DevFest tour in Southeast Asia, where companies like eXo Platform, Friendster, Globant, Google, hi5 and others presented on the new OpenSocial standard and its capacities to add social to any website activity, Google and eXo Platform organized simultaneous OpenSocial hackathons is three different cities: Hanoi (Vietnam), Sydney (Australia), and Singapore.

The goal of these hackathons was to show how to handle the new standard and to start working on it with Open Social partners that could help.

More than 50 people joined these events and it was nice to see enthusiastic people wanting to have a deeper understanding of OpenSocial uses. Among all these people, we met website developers wanting to add a social aspect to their web activities, as well as social network developers interested in the new technology and its possibilities.

In Hanoi, Vietnam, Jérémi Joslin, eXo Social product manager for eXo Platform, did a great presentation for application developers as well as for containers. Jérémi also explained how eXo Social leverages the OpenSocial standard and how it can be easily implemented on other major social networks.

The principal hack came from the NewHanoian.com website, whose founder, Tom Lancaster, wanted to increase the social penetration of the site.

It was a great exchange, and people discussed together about the standard, how to write applications, how to implement the server using Shindig and everybody got 2 t-shirts. It was also a great time for meeting other companies, sharing ideas and setting up new projects around the OpenSocial standard and other subjects.

All in all, it was an interesting meeting involving enthusiastic people and we hope at eXo Platform and WebPal to have feedback on their OpenSocial use.

In Sydney, Australia, 12 developers came to the Google Sydney office. Most of the attendees, who ranged from freelance contractors to employees of Australian startups like Atlassian, Momentville, and Wotif, had heard of iGoogle and OpenSocial but hadn't used either platform. We started off with an hour about using the OpenSocial APIs and socializing existing apps. Then, after 5 hours of hacking, the developers presented their creations over ice cream and beer - applications that displayed Flickr albums, intersections of friends, upcoming concerts in the area, and more.

In Singapore, 15 developers were hosted at the Google Singapore office. A lot of the developers had attended DevFest Singapore earlier in October, and so this was a great opportunity to refresh their knowledge on OpenSocial. The focus was on building OpenSocial applications for iGoogle. After an hour-long refresher, the rest of the day was spent hacking away on OpenSocial ideas. Developers were building apps to share their carbon footprint with friends, to organize rollerblading sessions together, and even to list the great food they are eating in Singapore.



















Jérémi Joslin from eXo Platform, Jason Vu from WebPal Networks, and Pamela Fox & Vinny Vijeyakuumar from Google