OpenSocial family grows in EMEA

It's been two exciting months for the OpenSocial community in Europe with lots of announcements at the Google Developer Days in London, Paris, Munich, Madrid, Milan, Prague, Moscow and Tel-Aviv (wow, that's a lot of nice cities!)

As a reminder, OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for building social applications that provide a common infrastructure for the social web. Using OpenSocial, both developers and websites can focus resources on their unique features rather than on dealing with different types of plumbing. Taking into account the most recent OpenSocial container announcements, developers will be able to access more than 600 million users who are part of OpenSocial-enabled networks.

In London, Netlog, the European social networking site, announced the availability of their application platform to more than 35 million members, and Hyves announced their launch to 7M members in the Netherlands.

"I think I can speak for all of us when I say that the Developer Day showed the momentum of OpenSocial and the committment of various containers and developers to make it a success. Being able to discuss the future of OpenSocial, both formally and informally, is another good reason for being there the next time as well ;-)" Yme Bosma, Hyves

In Paris, Viadeo, the European professional social network, released their public sandbox and already made some good contacts to get some interest apps running on it. Netlog opened their on-the-fly translation tool to apps developers, a very easy way to translate your social app to more than 20 languages.

"Viadeo is very proud to be part of the Opensocial adventure and looks forward to seeing in the next months the first professional applications to be added to its existing features, thanks to the Opensocial APIs…" Ariel Messas, Viadeo

Buddy Poke OpenSocial app running on Netlog French site (translated in French)

In Munich, four containers were on stage, with the local player Lokalisten opening their sandbox. XING, the European social network, presented their plans to launch OpenSocial support in the first half of 2009. Netlog and Viadeo also attended to reach out to the German developer community.

“Our aim was to give developers a feeling why OpenSocial in a professional social network such as XING will be different from OpenSocial as one may know it on other social networks. At the Google Developer Day we gained a lot of positive feedback on this, got to know many talented developers, and discussed some excellent new ideas of OpenSocial applications that bring value to business people worldwide.” Matthias Haesel, XING

There was certainly a lot of interest in OpenSocial at Developer Day in Madrid. The best attended codelabs were those focusing on OpenSocial, and I presented at the Orientation for start-ups session to over 100 developers!

In Prague and Moscow, I was amazed by the quality of the developers, the pertinence of their questions, and their interest in building social applications. Seznam announced their commitment to Opensocial at Developer Day in Prague, planning an implementation beginning of 2009 in their community services Lide.cz and Spoluzaci.cz. However, their sessions must have been quite productive because directly following them, Seznam told us they would be implementing OpenSocial as quickly as possible!

Lastly, our friends at Mail.ru were on stage at Developer Day in Moscow to present their OpenSocial implementation (already available to their 35M members), and from what I understood (I don't speak Russian!), it was a massive success. If everything goes well, they should have many new social apps coming for their social network after the GDD.

If you missed the Developer Day sessions, you can read the slides here :

• London : Hyves, Netlog, Viadeo
• Paris : Netlog, Viadeo
• Munich : Lokalisten, Netlog, Viadeo, XING
• Madrid : Netlog, Viadeo
• Milan : Freebar, Netlog, Viadeo
• Prague : Netlog
• Moscow : Mail.ru

It's really great to see that a year after its launch, OpenSocial is successful in Europe. See you all at the next Developer Days or at the next OpenSocial hackathon!

Limvirak Chea

New Business Development Manager, Google EMEA