The Project SocialSite team is pleased to announce a new milestone build, Project SocialSite Milestone 3 (download it here). With this build we are essentially feature complete for a first release and so for the next couple of months we will focus on fixing bugs, measuring and improving performance and making SocialSite ready for production.

We've made a lot of progress, but remember: this build is intended for TESTING ONLY! Do not use it in production as it has not been thoroughly tested and is known to be insecure. Here are the more serious of our known issues.

I should also point out that we've got some new nice new docs to go along with the new build:

• Developing a Simple Socially Enabled Application
• Using the SocialSite Administration Console

Enjoy!

OpenSocial's 1st birthday bash was last week and it sounds like it went very well. I wish I could have been there. Google's Dan Peterson posted a nice summary of the event, with pictures, slides, videos of the presentations and some great adoption numbers for the up-and-coming Social Networking standard:

• More than 315 million app installs
• More than 85 million daily canvas page views
• More than 7,500 applications
• More than 20 live containers

Pretty impressive, especially considering OpenSocial is not even version 1.0 yet. Here's a chart that shows adoption over the past year, and some well deserved party favors:

With SocialSite, we hope to add to those numbers. Stay tuned...

After the big announcement last week and the blog-silence this week, you might we wonder if we're still around. Well, we are and we're as busy as can be. We're working away on automatic profile creation, better theme support, new gadget directory and a couple of new efforts that we're not ready to talk about yet.

And, we haven't been totally silent this week either. You just have to know where to look. Just the other day I blogged the details of the SocialSite relationship model on my person blog, and explained how you can configure SocialSite to behave like various popular Social Networking services.

The Project SocialSite team is part of the GlassFish organization, so you can probably guess our preferred Servlet engine. And, unfortunately, we've been so busy with the development of our core Social Networking features that we haven't had much time to try SocialSite on other platforms (or even to move from GlassFish v2 to the brand new v3 Prelude release).

But, since SocialSite is basically just a Java EE webapp, it should run on Tomcat and other platforms. Sun's Sandeep Soni has proven that point and provided what looks to be a complete set of instructions for getting SocialSite up-and-running on Tomcat. Sandeep: thanks for the write-up!

Work on the next revision of the OpenSocial spec is underway the proposed schedule is below. You've got until tomorrow to get your ideas in.

Proposed Timeline:

• Topic ideas due 11/7
• Proposals & technical discussions end 11/21
• Draft created by 12/4
• Full draft review from 12/5 to 12/12
• Final publication 12/15

If you're insterested, then check out the 0.9 Proposals Spreadsheet that lists the proposals slated for discussion. And get involved in the OpenSocial and Gadgets Specification Discussion in the OpenSocial Group. Here on the SocialSite team we're working on getting two additions in: Bobby's Messaging changes and adding Paging Support for Activities.

Here are links to the discussion threads for the proposals we've made for OpenSocial v0.9 (you may need to join the group before you view these):

• Proposal: Messaging API changes
• Proposal: Activity Paging

Here are some more details about SocailSite milestone 2 (M2). The major new features that we've been working for M2 are Flexible Relationship, support for Gadget Themes and Gadget White-Listing. We've also been continuing to perfect our REST, RPC and JavaScript APIs.

Another thing you'll find in the M2 build is the first-cut of our new Dashboard Gadget, which is the place where a SocialSite user can respond to friend and group membership requests, search the social graph and more. As I mentioned yesterday, it's written using JavaScript, Open Social Templates and YUI components. Here are some screen-shots. The first shot shows the Activities tab, which can display your activities, your fiends activities and those of your groups.

The second shot shows the people tab, which can display/search all people in the network, filter by your friends, filter by your groups and enables you to request relationships, send messages and invite people to join your groups.

With M2, SocialSite is basically feature complete, but we've still got a lot of work to do to perfect our Widgets and Web Services. Some of the Gadget UIs and the Admin Console look pretty rough from a UI perspective. We'll be working on improving those, adding a nice Gadget Directory and improving Widget theming for our next milestone, which is scheduled for early December.

You can download the M2 build from our Downloads Page.

I'm going to blame the blog silence on hard work We're just now finishing what we're calling Project SocialSite milestone 2, which includes Flexible Relationships, a new Dashboard Widget, basic support for Gadget themes and Gadget white/black listing. The new Dashboard is implemented with Open Social Templates and YUI components. I'll post more tomorrow once I've updated some docs and captured some nice screen-shots.

More OpenSocial adoption news today: LinkedIn has also launched OpenSocial support with a Application Directory of nine applications including TripIp, Huddle, Wordpress and Slideshare. Here's what TechCrunch has to say about it:

Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch: LinkedIn has launched its new OpenSocial-based application platform called InApps - an answer to the platforms found on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, but without the clutter and “junk” apps that plague those sites. Unlike most other social networks, LinkedIn apps must go through an approval process before they will go live on the store, and all apps must be deemed “professional” in purpose to appear on the business-oriented social network. [Read on for application mini-reviews and more...]

And by the way, we're building Gadget white-listing into Project SocialSite, so you can implement the same sort of Gadget approval process for a SocialSite powered Social Network.

Yahoo announced the Yahoo Application Platform this week (that's a mini-screenshot of the app editor on the right) and, as we've been saying in our SocialSite briefings and presentations, "social is part of the platform." Yahoo is providing multiple social APIs including OpenSocial. Here's the OpenSocial support announcement on the OpenSocial API blog:

Sam Pullara, Vice President, Yahoo! Application Platform: "This is just the beginning for YAP and OpenSocial. As a founding member of the OpenSocial Foundation, Yahoo! is committed to supporting the complete OpenSocial specification and is working with the community to expand the specification to include OSML and OpenSocial templates. In addition, we are currently implementing a Shindig-based OpenSocial container which will allow us to provide full support for the OpenSocial REST Protocols and thus for Portable Contacts."

We're always glad to hear about OpenSocial adoption, the more live containers and apps the better from the SocialSite point of view. The same goes for Shindig.

Sam Pullara also mentions working with the community on OSML and OpenSocial templates and that's good news too. I've been working with templates for a couple of weeks now, using the implementation that's part of Shindig but not yet part of the OpenSocial spec. They're a vast improvement over the way we write gadgets now, from both productivity and maintainability points of view.

Related links:

• Yahoo! Open Strategy 1.0 includes OpenSocial and other social APIs
• OpenSocial Template spec latest, August 2008
• OpenSocial Templates Demo Nice demo and developer docs for OpenSocial templates

So says Roy Fielding, the author of the paper that defined REpresentational State Transfer (REST). And the same goes for the OpenSocial REST API, which is the basis for the SocialSite REST APIs. Here's part of his comment about OpenSocial:

Roy Fielding: The OpenSocial RESTful protocol is not RESTful. It could be made so with some relatively small changes, but right now it is just wrapping RPC results in common Web media types.

There are lots of advantages to being RESTful and we certainly want both the OpenSocial and the SocialSite REST APIs to live up to their names, so I'm glad to hear the changes are "relatively small." Now we just need to figure out what those changes are. I asked Roy to elaborate and I also started a thread (Google Groups login required) on the topic in the OpenSocial spec discussion group.

Dan Petersen, OpenSocial API blog: Hard to believe, but OpenSocial is just a few weeks shy of being a full year old! To celebrate, we're getting together to look back on the great progress we've all made in the past year and to discuss where we should take OpenSocial next. And of course, we'll eat birthday cake!

In addition to cake the event (details here) will include updates from developers, spec discussions and opportunities for hacking. The event will be held at 10AM on Thursday, November 13, 2008 at the MySpace office in San Francisco, CA. I can't make it myself, but hopefully some of the SocialSite team can attend.

Today, I've got another post in my series on SocialSite's OpenSocial extensions. The article is titled SocialSite's OpenSocial extensions, part 2: Web Services (continued) and it covers the new Web Services APIs we've added for Gadget management, Messages and Search.

As you may already know, to enable full read/write access to the Social Graph for the Project SocialSite Widgets and Web Services, we're extending the standard OpenSocial APIs. This week, I've started a series of blog posts to describe the extensions we are making. Part 1 covers SocialSite's OpenSocial extensions: Web Services.

Via the OpenSocial APIs blog, here's some good news for OpenSocial. OpenSocial v0.7 is now live across Ning's 500,000 niche social networks and there are more than 30 OpenSocial applications in the Ning directory. Here's the scoop from Ning's blog:

"OpenSocial is now live across our more than 500,000 social networks this morning. This release replaces and improves our older “Gadgets” beta functionality, and enables Network Creators and their members to add all sorts of great new features, or Applications, to their profile pages with a single click."

"Each social network on Ning now offers more than 30 OpenSocial applications from which to choose, including file sharing from Box.net, poll creation from Polldaddy and e-commerce from Shopit."

Read the full post for more including screen-shots and a screen-cast showing off the new OpenSocial feature set.

Did you miss or have trouble viewing Dave Johnson's webinar on Project SocialSite yesterday? Dave has now posted improved slides from his presentation. This may not be the same as seeing Dave's talk live, but you still can get useful information by reading the slides.

Want to build Project SocialSite from scratch? Then read this blog by project member Bobby Bissett.

In his blog, Bobby discusses setup information and has a quick screencast showing the steps he follows when developing Project SocialSite. He also discusses some FireFox extensions which are pretty helpful if you want to do development work.

Did you know that The Aquarium has its own TV channel? Okay, it's actually a Ustream.TV channel, but still... Each week, it has a new technical webinar covering some topic in the GlassFish community. And this week, our very own Dave Johnson will be talking about Project SocialSite.

As Dave describes, he'll be covering "the reasoning behind Project SocialSite, the basics of OpenSocial and what SocialSite adds, the SocialSite architecture and its Widgets and Web Services." It's happening tomorrow (Thursday) at 11:15am PT. For more information, see the webinar details page.

Do you have input to improve OpenSocial? If so, you're in luck. Dan Peterson sent out a call to start the ball rolling on the OpenSocial v0.9 Specification. For newbies he discusses the specification process. He also gives a recap of likely changes in v0.9.

He's looking to gather all ideas by this Friday (October 10th). So if you've been itching for a feature, now is the time to send your ideas in!

Want to invite your email contacts to join you on your favorite social networking site? You probably can. Want to do so without having to give your email account username and password to the social networking site? Your odds drop a bit. Want to do it all in a standardized way? Your odds drop to zero. But that could change, if the guys behind the Portable Contacts effort have their way. They're trying to provide a standardized and secure way for users to share address book data across different sites.

The specification is still at the draft stage. But, as Dare Obasanjo describes, there is already a lot to like about its approach (particularly the alignment with OAuth and OpenSocial). So while it's too early for a social networking server like Project SocialSite to directly leverage this work, we'll certainly be keeping an eye on it.

We've reached our first milestone release, available on the download page now. While you won't see many changes on the surface, that doesn't mean a lot hasn't changed. Our Milestone 1 release includes a complete rewrite of many of our back-end services to use the new OpenSocial REST and JSON-RPC APIs.

For more information on the REST API Dave has a great writeup in this blog. These changes give us a better alignment with OpenSocial, allow us to batch requests, and make it easier to support multiple forms of client to server and server to server communication. With these changes in the back end completed, we can focus our attention now towards UI improvements and new features. As always, let us know what you like, what you'd like to see, and especially let us know if you'd like to help!

SocialSite's own Dave Johnson was interviewed this week for the LiveMink podcast by Simon Phipps. Tune in for information on Project SocialSite, social networking, and some of our future plans.

It's good to see so much interest in using SocialSite -- with the all the changes going on in the implementation it's tough to keep the documentation current. In a previous entry, we had a short screen cast telling you what your site needed to do to host SocialSite gadgets. It was really more of an overview, so I've written up some more information to fill out the rest of the story.

This shouldn't be taken as a substitute for official documentation. But the benefit of a blog is that I can describe how things are working today -- if it changes tomorrow, tomorrow gets another blog!

Want to understand where OpenSocial is today and where it's heading tomorrow? Then read Joe Farber's interview with Joe Kraus (a Director of Product Management at Google who focuses on social networking and OpenSocial). They talk about the reach of current OpenSocial deployments (over 300 million users, as we've reported before), what's coming next with OpenSocial 0.8 (an emphasis on the RESTful Data APIs), and what's further down the road in the 0.9 plans (OpenSocial Templates, for one thing).

As we said last week, OpenSocial is the heart of Project SocialSite. So it's nice to see that it's getting plenty of attention.

Here is some Friday fun. How are Project SocialSite and OpenSocial standard related? Jamey has the answer. :)

Quite a few people have shown interest in contributing to Project SocialSite. While a few have some concrete ideas, most are not sure what to contribute and how. As Jamey points out, you can help us by filing bugs and enhancement requests, contributing code / patches, updating our wiki with FAQs, documentation and such.

For those of you particularly interested in taking part in development of features for Project SocialSite, we have put together some proposals for external contributions. This is just an initial list of ideas and we will keep updating this list. Take a look, send us an email if you are interested in contributing to the project and we will take it up from there.

A while back Dave Johnson posted a nice overview detailing how the REST API works in Apache Shindig. He just updated that to cover Shindig/Java's latest REST/RPC implementation.

For those interested in more, here is an article that delves into much more details on this topic.

Pat, Chris, and others gave an OpenSocial presentation last week at the London edition of Google Developer Day 2008. A full video of the session is now available. Check it out for a great introduction to all things OpenSocial (from writing and monzetizing an app to turning your own site into an OpenSocial container). And, of course, we're excited to see that they referenced some of Sun's next-generation web technologies.

First, Zembly is mentioned (around 15:00) as a great tool for authoring OpenSocial applications right inside your browser. And then they have a slide (around 46:00) describing our own SocialSite technology as a nice option for adding OpenSocial support within your own enterprise. Naturally, we couldn't agree more.

As we informed you earlier, we are working on better documentation. Very early drafts for some of the documents are available at our Project Wiki. What we have now are very early drafts and they are undergoing review and updates as we write this blog. Meanwhile, for immediate help, project member Bobby Bissett has put together this short screencast that can serve as a good primer on social-enabling your website using Project SocialSite.

As we mentioned last week, we are currently working on implementing complete support for OpenSocial RESTful API specification. We have published a formal proposal here that details how we are planning to achieve this. Feedback is most welcome.

Project SocialSite was announced to the public about a month back and since then we have pushed couple of promoted builds out for the community to try it out. We have got some feedback - good and bad :) So what are we up to now?

• We have a wiki for the project where we will be posting our all project related documentation like guides, "how to" documentaiton, design documentation, design proposals, feature lists etc
• We decided to reduce our dependence on jMaki. The proposal for this is available here. Implementation of this is almost done and is present in the latest workspace
• We also have a proposal for security model for the project
• We decided to implement complete support for RESTful API specification.
• The above two are big changes and hence the workspace may be a little bit unstable - please bear with us. But the latest promoted build is the one built before the above changes and hence should be stable
• We have been busy putting together some documentation plan. We will be using the project wiki to publish these draft documentation and we welcome feedback from the community
• The documentation on the wiki will be live and will keep changing as the product matures
• We also spent sometime look at our our development tests, test framework etc. We hope to have better automated tests available in the workspace soon

That is some of the things that we have been busy with. Now what the community can expect?

• The next promoted build may not be out for 2-3 weeks till we complete implementation of support for OpenSocial REST specification
• You can expect one milestone build every month for the next 2-3 months (at around the end of every month starting 9/30)
• You will see draft documentation starting to appear on our project wiki in the next week
• You will also see our detailed release plan, features available in each milestone etc

Thanks a lot for your support and interest so far. Keep the feedback coming. :)