OpenSocket Facebook app released as prototype

The OpenSocket Facebook application allows you to run OpenSocial gadgets within Facebook! Developers may recognise the Friends Dump example in the screenshot here, but here it is displaying (and ‘hugging’) Facebook friends…

The actual application linked above is for demonstration purposes only, and the framework will allow developers to set up a Facebook application to wrap their own OpenSocial gadgets only - a general purpose container as showcased here is not suitable for non-technical users since arbitrary third-party apps will be able to access unwitting users’ Facebook information.

This release was written by Dan Lester (me) with invaluable help, support, and advice from Ignacio Blanco. It could not have been completed without him, and I am thrilled to have made a new friend through this project!

Features of the current release:

• Supports all Google Gadgets of type ‘html’
• Gadgets requesting version 0.5 of OpenSocial will have access to the OpenSocial functionality implemented so far
• Person and People data fully supported, typically ‘VIEWER’ , numeric id, or ‘VIEWER_FRIENDS’
• Data Persistance - strongest support at the Person level
• Gadget User Preference settings can be fully configured via the ‘Edit’ button

Limitations:

• Gadgets run only in canvas view - there is no profile display; thus VIEWER=OWNER always
• People requests limited to first 20 results (that’s more friends than you have in Orkut, anyway…)
• Sending a batch of more than 3 or 4 requests at once may fail because it uses the URL (limited to 2k) to send request data; I could split these into multiple requests but prefer to translate to POST data as soon as possible
• No Activities feeds supported
• Persistance settings are not implemented efficiently: please don’t overuse, and be aware that I might clear old data in order to maintain performance (this is a novel scaling solution…)
• People Collections do not yet support iteration and array-like properties
• User Preferences will not be maintained for a gadget between sessions
• Locale will generally just default to, err… the default.

Because of the dangers of users trying out unscrupulous third-party gadgets which might steal their Facebook data, the demonstration app currently restricts standard users to trying out the approved gadgets only (I am evaluating whether a warning to the user would be enough). If you would like to see your OpenSocial gadget running in Facebook, please send the URL and I will put it up there - but note a copy will have to be hosted on my server just in case you’re one of those unscruplous third parties…

Please also get in touch to register your interest in the project, either as a developer of as a user. As discussed in the first post, we would like to expand this project to cover other code to bridge between social networks, and also reusable code frameworks to build Facebook or OpenSocial apps in general.