Couldn't make this one, glad to see the community pushing forward on OpenSocial.
It's mostly a focus issue -- The Opensocial "XML" format was a snowflake and didn't even have a proper schema. It's also part of a broader effort to mesh with established standards and reduce complexity.
(Also the pain of managing the XML/Atom code in shindig is a significant drag..)
I can imagine! Where would one look to get an overview of current real-world opensocial schemas? I mean a sense for what is actually used and useful? Anything that can feed into schema.org design discussions?
Since you mention it, we've talked about ideas for how to fit OpenSocial in with schema.org & microdata. But we haven't have the time to put any leg work into it.
Interesting -- "Deprecate XML support - If we were building an API today, would we even support XML?"
Dan Brickley, Mar 05 2012 on 1500wordmtu.com