Google's Open Social - Good News for Tendenci!
Techcrunch pre-announced Google's Open Social social software developer APIs today. This is very good news for Tendenci and a lot of other software companies! To explain.
Tendenci has always been written distributed. We have lots of small sites and they do not authenticate against one common source. This distribution is modeled after other fault tolerant systems to function best on a very hostile Internet. And is of course in addition to backups, etc. Nothing is fool proof, but this is a common sense start for the benefit of our clients.
Unfortunately distribution brings with it a set of problems. I am registered on Tendenci, the Houston Technology Center, The Houston Red Cross, etc etc and they are all Tendenci sites. Yet my "friends" list on each site has to be recreated each time and it doesn't mirror vox, or linkedin or facebook anyway. What a pain! In fact, I just don't bother.
From the Techcrunch post:
OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined
by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core
functions and information at social networks:
- Profile Information (user data) (Tendenci users and userprofiles)
- Friends Information (social graph) (Tendenci contacts table)
- Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff) (Tendenci eventlogs and authors table)
So the question is "on release can we really just connect Tendenci to Open Social?". Well it won't completely be THAT easy, but pretty close. We already use third party authentication services and integrate with numerous vendors through an XML data interchange. And we won't really know until we get to sink our teeth into the Open Social API. But right now it looks very promising. More as we learn more!
