Raymond Law

OpenSocial API in action within Ning networks: Open Social: screencast and screenshots

I first read from Marc Andreessen’s post Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web about this. It’s also been techcrunched.

Google is launching OpenSocial API this week. If you are familiar with Facebook’s API platform, you will easily understand the importance of OpenSocial and how it works. Unlike Facebook’s proprietary API using FBML, FQL, ..., OpenSocial uses standard Javascript and HTML so that you can do what Facebook already does on any existing social networks.

As an app developer, you can build your application and have it run in any participating social networks (Will Facebook join one day?).

As an owner of a social network, you can participate in OpenSocial to allow your network’s app developers to build applications to live within your network, and your users to add these applications to their profiles. You can create your own social networks with Ning.

This is indeed great news for everyone as the web has become more and more customizable and flexible, and user experience will be enhanced by innovative app developers.

We will definitely think about doing this at OnMyList.

For the past week, when I logged out of Yahoo Mail, it crashes my Firefox and all other tabs. This happened on both Ubuntu and Windows. Another proof that GMail >>>>>>>> Yahoo Mail. Their Ajax stuff already consumes a lot of bandwidth upon logging in, making my other tabs load slower. One of these days they will just annoy me to the point that I cancel my Yahoo account…

I had a chance to play with the iPhone at an Apple store yesterday. I found that if you go to Google Map or any Google Map mashup in Safari, you can’t drag the map! This is because the iPhone interprets your finger dragging as dragging the web page, not the Google Map on the web page.

The Google Map integrated into the iPhone itself works great though. Is this a bug or am I just missing something? Hopefully Apple fixes this soon because this means all websites that have drag and drop like Ta-da list are not usable (though I have not tried Ta-da list on the iPhone).

Update: Just headed over to the iPhone Developer Site. According to Apple’s Web Development Guidelines:

“A few other things to keep in mind about fingers as an input device:

• There are no gestures to perform cut, copy, paste, drag-and-drop, and text selection operations.
• The width of a finger limits the density of links on a page. If the links are too close, your users won’t be able to choose a single one.”

So the answer is no, at least for now.