Namaste,fellow readers, I am Divyansh sharma a regular reader here at WATBlog, and absolutely love the startup culture, so when i saw an opportunity to contribute towards it by writing an article for WATBlog, i jumped on it!

On 5th september i attended Google Social Web and Cloud Computing Conference in Delhi, the event dealt with the basic introduction of opensocial, shindig, and google app engine, and since not a whole lot of new information was presented at the event, i have decided to tilt this
article more towards “how can you benefit from opensocial” than “what happened at the event”
starting with a basic glossary of what’s what, (i ll try my best to avoid fancy words and keep it as simple as possible)

Container - The platform for your application example - orkut, myspace and facebookthough it should be noted that the definition of a container is not just limited to social networks, but includes all platform that would allow you to build social apps other examples include - iGoogle and Gmail (in near future, as hinted during the seminar)

Application - This is just a fancy way of saying it, just thing of it as HTML + some JAVASCRIPT thats it or to simplify it a little further, it is your webpage, shown inside an iframe.

Shindig - It is a new project in the Apache Software Foundation incubator and is an open source implementation of the OpenSocial specification and gadgets specification. To put it more simply, any platform + shindig = would allow you to build social apps for that platform.

To put things into prospective: It is rather easy for any big or small social network to implement and allow open social apps within their platform, so if your next door neighbor decides to build a social network on his own, he can use shindig to allow opensocial apps within that network and the best part is, that shindig isnt just limited to social networks, imagine phpbb or vBulletin figure out how to integrate shindig within forums but at this point we are getting ahead of ourselves but at least the way that things look, it seems like social apps will form a big part of internet’s future.

What’s in it for me?

Now as most of us already know that the most popular social apps are either flash games or appeal to a very general interest, and of course not everyone of us is a Flash game developer or can offer unlimited supply of free sms so its futile to expect or imagine that it is a child’s play to reach millions of users in blink of an eye but what is possible and feasible is to use it as leverage, to use social apps to generate ripples in the market, to expand your presence and attract viral popularity, and build more awareness towards your brand/website so instead of aiming towards millions in a week, target a more feasible number to begin with, how about increasing your readership/visitors by a thousand? or incremental viral increase of a few hundred a day? These numbers are not only possible, but also easy to sustain.

This is where the seminar came in, it gave us brief introduction of open social api and a few demos on how to build a simple application using the api, though there isnt much to write about except javacode sniplets which can easily be found here ( http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ )
the seminar focused more towards the technical side of oepnsocial, shindig, and app engine, but i wanted to ask a more basic question first..

Should social applications be a part of your internet strategy ?
i would love to follow up with an article going deeper into “whats in it for me” and “how you can leverage social apps in your website/project?”

So make sure you leave a comment below. Ask any question or share your opinion so i can take this forward in the right direction.

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