ReadWriteWeb

Most of us have profiles on a wide variety of services these days. Thankfully, most of these profiles are available in machine-readable microformats like hCard or XFN (XHTML Friends Network). For developers, Google's Social Graph API makes discovering these profiles easier, though this is still a relatively complicated process. Now, however, Ident Engine, a new open-source JavaScript library that finds and aggregates user profiles and related activity streams, makes this process a lot easier.

Google just rolled out 18 social gadgets for its iGoogle start page. These social gadgets turn iGoogle into a far more interactive and social experience, as users can now play casual games with other iGoogle users and share videos and to-do lists right from the iGoogle homepage. As Google's Marissa Mayer and Rose Yao, iGoogle's product manager, told us yesterday, while the first incarnation of iGoogle was about connecting people with information, the service will now also focus on connecting people to each other.

When the Google-led OpenSocial campaign launched in October 2007 it aimed to give developers a common environment that application publishers could publish widgets to with one set of code, deployable across Google sites, MySpace, Hi5 and numerous other social networks.

A directory of OpenSocial Apps launched today and the reality is even further from that goal than we expected. Out of 12,456 apps listed, only 83 are running on two or more "containers." That's 0.7% or one out of every 1500. Update: See this reply below from Google's Kevin Marks. Marks says that cross-network presence was counted manually and is actually larger than it appears in the directory.

Sprout, developer of a unique drag-and-drop widget creation service, announced today that its development platform now supports the Facebook Platform, Facebook Connect, and OpenSocial. According to the press release, this will "enable brands and agencies to focus their time on the creative campaign development and still reap the rewards that social networking applications offer.." Which means, if you are using Sprout for your ad campaigns already, you now instantly have access to three more social platforms to deploy on. If you aren't using Sprout, why not?

MySpace just announced that it will bring its Open Platform to Windows Mobile phones. The new MySpace mobile application for Windows Mobile will be built on top of Microsoft's Silverlight platform. In addition, MySpace also announced its MySpace Silverlight SDK, which will make it easier for developers to build OpenSocial applications using Silverlight.

MySpace also announced that LG will preload the MySpace Mobile application on the next-generation of its Windows Mobile 6.1 phones.

A couple of weeks ago we celebrated the first birthday of Google's OpenSocial project, an open API framework for social networks and websites. Google's OpenSocial Blog recently presented some statistics, including that OpenSocial now reaches nearly 675 M registered users and there are 7,500 applications.

What's interesting about these numbers is that the single largest number of registered users isn't coming from MySpace, hi5 or even Orkut. The largest user base appears to be from 51.com, which as we've reported before is one of China's largest social networks with 130M registered users.

Just about half a year ago, Google announced a limited beta of Friend Connect, which allows site owners to display OpenSocial based gadgets on their sites and site visitors to sign in to these social gadgets with their OpenID, AIM, Yahoo, or Google accounts.

Amit Agarwal has been keeping a close eye on Friend Connect since it was announced and he assumes that the service could go live pretty soon. Just last week, Google published a new YouTube video geared towards users and now the support site for Friend Connect is available as well.

It's been a little over a year since Google announced OpenSocial, a common API for social applications across multiple websites. It's an aggressive undertaking: an underlying technology designed to help all developers add intelligent social features to their offerings more quickly and easily, regardless of the types of sites they're developing.

To commemorate the first year, OpenSocial fans recently gathered at MySpace for a celebration and an update on the progress over the past 12 months. The verdict? The concept of OpenSocial has traction - and hundreds of millions of users currently benefiting from it.

Not to be outdone by the recent US Presidential hoopla, the OpenSocial Foundation - a non-profit corporation that facilitates the development of OpenSocial specifications - held its elections for "Community Directors" this week. The elections determine who will fill the remaining two seats on the Foundation's Board.

The votes have been tallied and the results are in. OpenSocial Foundation members have selected Jay Parikh of Ning and Joseph Smarr of Plaxo as their community representatives.

The OpenSocial Foundation has announced elections for its Board of Directors, the governing body that helps the non-profit organization "sustain the free and open development of OpenSocial specifications."

Thirteen candidates have been nominated to fill two "Community Director" Board seats. Among the nominees are several familiar names including Chris Messina, Krishna Sankar, and Joseph Smarr. (For more information on each of these candidates and the other 10 nominees, visit the OpenSocial Foundation.)

Coca-Cola quietly launched one of their first social media applications last weekend, a bookmarking widget for Facebook called CokeTag. (Coke Singapore also has a Facebook application out, promoting a tie-in with UEFA EURO 2008.) CokeTag is not only a smart play from the company, but also a fairly useful app as far as profile widgets go. The app allows users to create customizable Flash bookmark widgets linking to link collections on any topic they're passionate about.

Many small and medium sized businesses may have an interest in maintaining a presence on social networks, but don't the time, money, or resources to do so. For them, a new service provided by a company called Bizzlr can help. For a small monthly fee, companies can use Bizzlr's solution to connect with customers on many of the major social networks.

A report on BBC's technology program, Click, has exposed yet another security flaw in Facebook - one that could comprise users' privacy. This particular hack involves using a Facebook application to steal a users personal information - and the information of all their friends - without the user's knowledge.

Google today made an announcement that could prove to be not only important to the evolution of OpenSocial and iGoogle, but also to the social networking sector itself. Google announced a new developer sandbox for iGoogle that includes support for their OpenSocial APIs. Essentially, Google is working toward turning their start page property into a social network, though they haven't overtly said so. Google's move makes this officially the start of a trend we're seeing in start pages to get more social, and an idea we've been pushing at RWW for the past year.

Mobile social networking company Frengo has released a toolkit for development of Open Social and Facebook applications on mobile phones. The Open Social Mobile Toolkit supports MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, and Facebook and allows developers of applications on those networks to extend them to the mobile phone. In addition to extending support for the Open Social and Facebook platforms to the mobile phone, the Frengo toolkit allows developers to monetize applications via the company's social advertising platform or via premium SMS.

Popular social networking site Hi5 is launching its implementation of the OpenSocial platform today, the first apps go live at noon PST. The company is rolling out the apps very slowly, 1% of users will be able to access them at noon, 10% by the end of the day. The first 100 approved apps (there are 53 approved for launch today) will receive 1 year of free hosting from the Joyent Accelerator (who may or may not have been dumped by Twitter as a scalability problem) and free translation from English to Spanish or vice versa.

The only apps mentioned on the company blog so far look pretty silly. OpenSocial doesn't seem to be working out like at least tech-centric users were hoping.

A month ago, ReadWriteWeb writer Marshall Kirkpatrick utilized his huge network of Twitter followers to facilitate a discussion about APIs and platforms. He shared the highlights of the conversation in a post on this blog. The discussion was one that really captured our imaginations, so today we're exploring the issue further and presenting 5 dynamics that you should consider when picking a platform.

Yesterday evening, our own Marshall Kirkpatrick was a guest on G4TV's "Attack of the Show" television program to discuss Google's OpenSocial platform. Marshall gave his thoughts on why Google formed a foundation with Yahoo! and News Corp. (MySpace) to govern the open source project, and what that means for users and data portability. He also spoke about why Facebook has stayed away from OpenSocial so far and offered thoughts on whether or not the platform will end up succeeding. An excerpt and video is below.

The launch of the OpenSocial Foundation yesterday was probably more about preempting lawsuits than it is about anything else, but getting Yahoo!, Google and Newscorp all in the same room raised some eyebrows. It also raises some big questions. In fact, there may be more questions on the table about OpenSocial than answers.

Is OpenSocial for real? It it going to make a big impact on the web? Before asking all of that, here's some thoughts on the nitty gritty as the platform moves forward.

The big news today was the announcement of the OpenSocial Foundation, a joint effort by Google, Yahoo! and MySpace's Newscorp. As we reported earlier today, the creation of an open, non-profit organization will assuage concerns about whether Google is exercising leadership or control with OpenSocial.

But there are other concerns. In the press call, which you can listen to on ReadWriteTalk, our own Marshall Kirkpatrick asked whether the foundation will splinter OpenSocial and Microsoft?