Thanks for these questions. I’m about to write another blog post to cover the Open Social features that we’ve implemented within OpenSocket. The aim is certainly to have everything from the basic API - and all of them are currently implemented, although some more fully than others.

For example, requestShareApp will take the user to a page where they can select friends to invite, but currently the gadget cannot select these friends in advance on behalf of the user. We are working through these smaller issues with beta testers, so any gadget authors should just try out OpenSocket, and let us know any areas they think need addressing. Most importantly, you’ll find the ‘friends’, persistance, and news feed functionality to work fairly comprehensively.

As to why it is more efficient than going in the other direction… well, it depends how you accomplish that! If you take a Facebook app written before Open Social was even announced, then you’re likely to find it needs to be substantially rewritten to work in Open Social. Programmers with more resources will nowadays take more care to build a more abstract framework, etc. There are certainly other ways emerging to bridge the gap between Open Social and Facebook, targetting the middle ground; but we’re not really doing that - OpenSocket is about bringing a full Open Social widget platform to Facebook, matching as closely as possible the way other Open Social environments work, including the provision of hosting for the dynamic components, etc.

Thanks,

Dan

James
from
FaceySpacey.com - “The Web 2.0 Startup Incubator”

James
from
FaceySpacey.com - “The Web 2.0 Startup Incubator”