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

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