Introducing the OpenSocket project

The initial goal is to bring OpenSocial widgets to Facebook before they reach MySpace, thus demonstrating the power of technology over business politics.This can be seen as a ‘petition’ to Facebook to open up once they’ve had a chance to evaluate OpenSocial. Final success will be achieved when Facebook accept that hosting OpenSocial widgets via OpenSocket has been beneficial and they can put their pride aside to embrace this emerging open standard.

Given the inherently kamikaze nature of this project, we have secondary goals - which, realistically will be the long-term legacy of this project.

We will establish new standards of operation in collaborating on an open source social web app. The hosting requirements for a Facebook app - not least the fact that apps are tied to individuals’ accounts - may call for new procedures in the development, testing, and deployment of the app. As code if necessary, these lessons should be ‘exportable’ from this project.

The working knowledge of Facebook and OpenSocial APIs that we will gain through our primary goal will allow the project to expand to allow interaction in other directions and/or with social networks. For example, a side-project would be to allow data from arbitrary Facebook apps to flow into the OpenSocial world.