OpenSocket Supports Apache’s Shindig Project

We’ve said before that we want to help standardise Open Social by encouraging open source development of container code. Originally, it was envisaged that the initial OpenSocket code - which acts as an Open Social container within Facebook - might be useful to web sites that want to build in their own support for Open Social gadgets.

The Shindig project, championed by the Ning team, has been set up within the Apache Foundation in order to provide a solid reference implementation. Now Google have offered their support, and even hope to use it in their sites. The OpenSocket team will also contribute anything we’ve learnt about building gadget support into a web site.

So we are no longer planning to release a separate code base for OpenSocket. The Facebook-specific components of OpenSocket will be developed independently, and we will provide this to gadget developers in the form of a service.

We believe it is in the interest of Open Social gadget writers to be able to publish their gadgets on Facebook, but do not feel it is necessary or advisable for them to have low-level access to the OpenSocket technology. Also, we had concerns that users running arbitrary third-party gadgets within our Facebook app would cause us (as the operators of the OpenSocket app) to essentially defer our responsibilities under the Facebook terms-of-service to any gadget writer.

Our solution will be for individual gadget writers to register their own Facebook app, but point the settings directly to our servers so that we take care of the gadget conversion and hosting. For the end-user, this will be slightly less flexible - they will no longer be able to try out any gadget URL unless it has been wrapped already. But for gadget writers it will be far more convenient to wrap and promote their own app, which would then represent itself in the Facebook news feeds etc, rather than being trapped within an OpenSocket window onto the Open Social world.

Any questions or suggestions are welcomed. If you are interested in wrapping your gadgets, please get in touch! Distribution and hosting partners are also sought.