The internet has been abuzz with the release of the ‘Open Social’ social website gadget building API.

If you have completely missed it, you can find a lot of info and a good introduction movie of the ‘Google Campfire’ event here:
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

Of course being both professionally and personally interested in all new developments on the internet, i couldn’t resist diving right into it; So what does it all mean from a technological point of view? What it comes down to is that Google has created a set of standards (the open social API) and a basic Javascript framework with which Open Social sites can host uniform Gadgets.

This is a huge deal, simply put because a lot of the existing social sites have either no, or poor gadget support, or used a proprietary coding standard, which meant your dream application wouldn’t be able to run everywhere, or wouldn’t even be realizable on your favorite social site.

Open Social set out to change of all this, and Google’s own social site (orkut) combined with many others (such as hi5.com, ning, myspace, linked in, etc) will be able to use the same Open Social gadgets, potentially creating a huge developer pool for gadgets to run on those sites, and a slew of new gadget choices for its current 20+ million users.

So far so good right?

Well the devil is always in the details of course, as often is the case in bleeding edge technology, well, there is some bleeding going on.

The current orkut sandbox is temperamental and often greets a user with a ‘bad bad server, no donut for you‘ error. In this case i would simply advice to refresh the page again after getting a fresh cup of coffee.

Or sometimes the gmodules.com server your application/gadget is assigned too, has random crashes (502 or 503 errors and ‘internal server error’ json responses). If thats the case for you, the only thing you can do is remove the application from your ‘My Applications’, and rename it on your server (ie app.xml to for instance app1.xml), and add it again to your applications. Since its a ‘new application’, it will be assigned to a new gmodules.com server, which hopefully does work; If not, rinse and repeat until it does.

Also don’t be supprised if suddenly your favorite sandbox is down for half a day or more.. when google says Alpha (no thats not the famous google beta), they seem to mean it

And of course sign up to the orkut sandbox, hi5 sandbox and make a ning community where you can enable opensocial support (write once, debug everywhere while we are still in the ‘alpha’ faze of development) and make your self very familiar with their development documentation, example gadget containers.

Finally defiantly subscribe to the google open social mailing list, there is a lot of development chatter going on there, and google engineers partake in the discussions too.. there’s many nuggets of knowledge to find there.

And check out the projects Links of Interest wiki page.