First impressions on Open Social API from Google

I was going to take a pass on looking at the new Open Social API from Google for a couple of weeks.

I changed my mind this weekend and decided to at least find the Open Social home page at Google. If you have not looked into Open Social yet, you might want to read this post just to set your expectations,

It is very different than I expected. It is a Javascript API. You do all of your application development using whatever standard web technologies you want.

The programming itself you do in Javascript.

The UI your application targets is HTML.

I had expected a UI API but apparently you directly program your open social app to hammer out its own HTML.

Watch the video on the Open Social API home page.

The Google Spokesman introduces the API by showing you actual code. The image is too small to read the letters but if you know the Javascript syntax you can get a general feel for the API. The documentation lets you see the details anyway.

The three API modules are:

1. people - friends, etc.
   
2. activities
3. persistence
   

Next comes the meat of the presentation. Representatives from Ning, Flickster, Sales.com, and many other social network service & software companies are are featured. They each describe and demo a brand new feature for their site that they created with the Open Social API.

An interesting surprise at the end was find that MySpace is participating in Open Social.