So many thoughts about OpenSocial and the reference implementation, Shindig. I have it thank for my time at hi5, LinkedIn and then Google.
Some little known facts about OpenSocial
- Hangouts Apps (remember those?) were based on OpenSocial containers.
- OpenSocial powered the LinkedIn Apps Platform and Labs for a number of years. The team built Rails and Node apps and deployed on Joyent.
- Eric Schmidt gave a pep talk to the working group pre-launch and mentioned about how open always wins in the end...
- MySpace was concerned about the attack surface of 3p apps running in iframes. They toyed with the idea of requiring a webkit browser plugin to run apps (!). It did lead to Caja* as a project.
- The work on OpenSocial led in small part to the Activity Streams spec which led to ActivityPub and thus the latest Fediverse protocols. I like to think of OpenSocial as dead, but a good organ donor.
Fun times...