Google's OpenSocial project is celebrating a year of major progress in its project to establish a common set of tools for developing social networking applications.
The celebration took place yesterday, and MySpace, an early supporter, held an event in its San Francisco office to mark the project's first birthday. Representatives from other vendor backers attended, as well as about 300 developers, and, of course, staffers from Google, which launched OpenSocial in November 2007.
Using OpenSocial, developers have made more than 7,500 applications, which in turn have been installed more than 315 million times in over 20 social networking Web sites.
Among the technology highlights is the significant enhancement of the API, now in version 0.8, and the delivery of a server-side REST [Representational State Transfer] component, important for mobile and enterprise applications that need to tap backend servers.
There is also an open-source reference implementation of the OpenSocial API called Shindig, overseen by the Apache Software Foundation and designed to let Web site owners implement OpenSocial easily in a matter of hours.
What hasn't been accomplished is the rather important task of convincing Facebook to support OpenSocial, a major gap considering the company operates the most popular platform for social networking applications.
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