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

On December 20th we were invited to present at the Developer Garage in Pune. This conference was organized by a couple of OpenSocial enthusiasts. It was hosted by Thoughtworks in their Pune office and sponsored by Sun Microsystems. The event was attended by more than 130 developers.




























It was a very packed schedule and we were able to cover a lot, starting from the OpenSocial basics to advanced sessions on topics such as Latency in OpenSocial apps and Apache Shindig Architecture.

Aparna from Sun Microsystems' evangelism group demoed Zembly, a platform for creating and hosting OpenSocial apps. Agriya Technologies gave a presentation on the integration of OpenSocial with their social networking products.

There was also a parallel workshop to develop an Orkut app, "India I Care", for an NGO at the event. Developers were able to complete the basic scenarios and are now fine-tuning the app before it goes live.

Some photographs from the event can be found here.

Aparna, Aman Jain, and Amit Kumar also blogged about the event.

Overall it was very heartening to see so much interest and momentum around OpenSocial. Pune has a vibrant developer community, which has been organizing many events around open-source technologies.

Rajdeep Dua
Google Developer Relations
India

We hosted the OpenSocial Summit in Korea at the Google office on November 18, 2008, and it was the 1st OpenSocial event with Korean OpenSocial partners and developers.
















We first were planning to host 60 people and send invitations to 80 developers and partners. However, we got 94 RSVPs and more than 90 people came to the summit. The room at the Google Korea office was literally packed. About a half of the attendees were from large Korean portals and social networks including Daum, Paran, Cyworld, SK Telecom, Nexon, and Neowiz. The other half were developers, from independent developers to large Korean content providers.

During the summit, Google gave three presentations.
- Mickey Kim: OpenSocial update and why OpenSocial
- Chris Schalk & Jiwoong Lee: OpenSocial technical overview + technical presentation & demo for containers
- Arne Roomann-Kurrik & Yung Choi: Technical presentation & demo for application developers

Also four OpenSocial containers in Korea gave impressive presentations.
- Daum: Talked about four reasons for OpenSocial, which are 1) Rich widget, 2) Participations of developer community, 3) Strengthen Daum's community services, 4) Reliability.
- Paran: Talked about how OpenSocial will make Paran more open and social ans how Paran is partnering with and supporting key applications developers in Korea.
- Myspace Korea: Talked about how Myspace is using OpenSocial to operate Myspace developer platform and MyOpenSpace API.
- IDtail: Showed entertaining and interactive demos of IDtail's OpenSocial applications.
















In the afternoon, we had two break-out sessions.
- OpenSocial round table: Containers and developers freely discussed random issues and networked.
- Hackathon: Many developers won OpenSocial T-shirts! :)


Thank you for all attendees and we look forward to more OpenSocial events in Korea.

Mickey Kim, New Business Development

We ( Google India Developer Relations team) landed late night in Pune on the 25th for the IndicThreads conference. This conference was held at Sun-n-Sand Hotel, one of the landmarks of Pune's bund garden road.
























This was a 3 day conference on Java and Web Technologies where we were given a 5 hour slot to cover OpenSocial and GWT.























Developers from local companies ranging from TechMahindra, TCS, Infosys and several other startups in Pune attended the event.

In the OpenSocial session we ( Rajdeep, Anash and Vijaya ) covered OpenSocial Introduction followed by API deep dive. This was followed up with discussion on Shindig Architecture.
DJ Patil, Chief Scientist of LinkedIn gave a talk on LinkedIn's platform strategy as well as adoption of OpenSocial platform. There was a lot of interest from the developer community on the app submission process.

Anirudh from the Developer Relations Team at Google covered advanced features of GWT as well as what is new in GWT 1.5.

Slides from the OpenSocial and GWT talks are embedded below:






It was an excellent experience participating in IndicThreads and talking about technologies which are changing the Social and Web world. We hope to return very soon to engage with developers in Pune.

Rajdeep Dua
Google Developer Relations, India

It's been almost a month since the first DevFest in Singapore.  Have you brushed up on the OpenSocial documentation, built a few simple apps, and are now looking to hack with like-minded developers?  Yes?  Then there's good news!

Google Singapore will be hosting an OpenSocial Hackathon at the Google office.  At the same time, eXo Platform and Webpal Networks will be holding an OpenSocial Hackathon in Hanoi.  

Interested in attending?  Places are limited so sign up quick!

Sign up for the Singapore OpenSocial Hackathon 

Sign up for the Hanoi OpenSocial Hackathon 

Bring your laptop, charger, enthusiasm, and ideas.  Food and wi-fi will be provided by the organisers.  There will be talks, brainstorming, and a share-and-tell at the end of the day ... and oh, of course, hacking!

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer

Hey, mates!

Now that I'm fully settled in Australia and close to acquiring a near perfect Australian accent, I'm working on various events for Aussie developers. Here's what's coming up in the next 3 weeks:


Google Developer Hackathon @ the Open Source Developers' Conference 2008
Dec. 2nd, 9am-5pm

OSDC attendees can join us for a day of introducing & coding OpenSocial, OpenLayers, and Google App Engine applications. Also join us during the main OSDC conference later that week in watching the keynote by Chris DiBona, dinner keynote by Anthony Baxter (he's given me a preview, it'll be a riot), and various talks by Googlers: "(Literal) World Dominination" by Tim Ansell, "The State of Python" by Anthony (again). Stop by our table on Thursday for some blinky pins, demos, and information on hiring.


iGoogle OpenSocial Hackathon
Dec. 13th, 2-9pm

Web developers are invited to come to the Google Sydney office for a half-day of hacking in the iGoogle OpenSocial sandbox. You can read more about the event and register over at the OpenSocial wiki.


Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

As we wrap up the Google DevFest Tour in Asia Pacific (six cities in five countries), we are very excited to share that 51.com has launched OpenSocial support on the 51.com Developer Platform to their 31M+ users in China.

This launch is a significant milestone in the Asia Pacific region and welcome news for tens of thousands of developers in the region because 51.com is one of the leading social networks in China. Their support of OpenSocial immediately enables developers to write OpenSocial applications, which offers many benefits..

First, developers can develop apps that serve and reach a large user base with established viral channels in 51.com's vibrant online communities. Second, developers can migrate their OpenSocial apps with ease to any other social network that supports the OpenSocial standard. Lastly, developers building OpenSocial applications may choose to monetize their applications (e.g. through ads or virtual currency) resulting in sustainable long term business in an emerging ecosystem.

To learn more about OpenSocial application development on 51.com, go to the OpenSocial developer community on the 51.com Developer Platform.

Shawn Shen, Developer Relations