Open Social

ddumont

Have you guys given any though over what it might mean to break up some of these page components and become an open social container?

It may drastically improve the ease of interop between components doing ajaxy stuff

Todd

I'm trying to think here. We did do some stuff with embed Vanilla into Blogger which I know is an open social container. Beyond that I haven't looked into open social that much. When I have it was usually in the context of trying to go through the docs quickly and they were to complex for that.

With regards to making Vanilla work as individual components in general though I believe we are on the cusp of that in a big way. Vanilla has a tonne of functionality that we haven't really taken advantage of yet. We're kind of working towards some awesome, but I don't want to release features before their ready.

I'll give another look into open social, but if you have a rundown on why it may be good I'd love to hear it. To tell the truth I haven't heard of it taking off in any significant way.

Todd

I'm trying to think here. We did do some stuff with embed Vanilla into Blogger which I know is an open social container. Beyond that I haven't looked into open social that much. When I have it was usually in the context of trying to go through the docs quickly and they were to complex for that.

With regards to making Vanilla work as individual components in general though I believe we are on the cusp of that in a big way. Vanilla has a tonne of functionality that we haven't really taken advantage of yet. We're kind of working towards some awesome, but I don't want to release features before their ready.

I'll give another look into open social, but if you have a rundown on why it may be good I'd love to hear it. To tell the truth I haven't heard of it taking off in any significant way.

ddumont

We're looking at it at work in a big way.

By making Vanilla an OpenSocial container, you would be able to embed any opensocial gadget inside. There are various required and optional APIs that can be implemented by a container in order to access things like who your friends are, register rpc calls, etc.

An open social gadget could be something as simple as a friends list, or a friends list that changes it's display to show which of your friends happen to be in a conversation you are currently looking at.

Gadgets can respond to all kinds of events like what's currently selected on the page.

The container can also provide OAuth to allow gadgets to take advantage of the container's configured relationships.

It's pretty powerful, but no small task. At work we're looking at the shindig reference implementation (java) but there is a php one as well in the same source tree.

I will grant you that the docs are not that great... I often am frustrated with them... But there are some pretty cool possibilities for opensocial in a forum model like this. Another benefit is the no-page-transition model. Something like that could really increase performance and reduce server load.