ReadWriteWeb

Last week in Santa Clara, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), hosted its annual Technical Plenary (TPAC), at which 500 representatives from W3C's community met for a week. The social Web was high on the agenda.

Currently, the most familiar social Web standard is OAuth2 from the IETF, widely used for open authorization (which allows us to give second-party Social Web services access to information without asking for a Gmail password) on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. However, it now appears there may be a number of other standards in the wings, ranging from work in browser-based identity to rolling your own Google+'s Circles in a federated Social Web to emerging work around the hot topic of social business.

Google Plus doesn't have a public API yet, nor has it announced when one will be available. But if you want to find out about future developer opportunities, Google has a mailing list you can sign-up for to receive more information in the future.

Developers are already clamoring for an API, which is a good sign for Google Plus. Mohamed Mansour commented "Would be nice if there was a Google+ API. I would have made a Buzz to Google+ importer today."

We told you earlier today about IBM's strategy of targeting developers with its new enterprise 2.0/social business platform. Part of IBM's strategy is to emphasize open standards such as ActivityStreams, OAuth and OpenSocial.

"Open standards" is a major part of the strategy of several vendors, such as Jive and Socialtext. We published a paper last year on the subject of web-oriented architecture and open standards that was sponsored by Socialtext.

How important are open standards to you as a customer?

Oracle released a private cloud managment API called the Oracle Cloud API to the Oracle Technology Network. today. The specification is available here (PDF). The company also submitted the Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model API, a subset of the Oracle Cloud API, to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) for consideration as the task force's IaaS API standard. The DMTF submission is not being released to the public at this time. Oracle is latest vendor to try its hand at creating a cloud computing standard.

More and more web developers are earning their mobile wings. Mountain View-based Appcelerator just announced their beta release of Titanium Mobile - an open source, open standards tool that lets developers build applications with native UI elements, code compilation, device storage and geo-location APIs on both the iPhone and Android.

With Appcelerator's new mobile offerings, web programmers can avoid the pitfalls of Objective-C or Java, and use basic Javascript, HTML, and CSS to build their apps.

Whenever you buy an airline ticket or book a hotel room these days, chances are that a good part of that transaction will run through Sabre's network. Sabre is one of the world's largest suppliers of technology solutions for the airline and travel industry. What you may not be aware of, however, is that Sabre has made open-source software a cornerstone of its technology strategy. Sabre already relies on a number of open-source projects to handle thousands of transactions every second, and today, Sabre and Progress FUSE announced a new partnership that will make a number of FUSE's open-source offerings a cornerstone of Sabre's technology.

While OpenID is one of the more interesting online identity concepts, usability issues have clearly hampered its mainstream adoption. Flock, MySpace, and OpenID provider Vidoop have now come together to develop a browser extension for Flock that makes using OpenID a lot easier for Flock users. Besides managing your OpenID credentials, the extension also detects when a site supports OpenID and lets you sign in with the click of a button.