Google's OpenSocial Platform Will Rule Techie Minds by 2010

Though the platform will take another six months to gear up and to prove itself as a well-defined and flawless system for the global software vendors, says one of the first users of OpenSocial Platform.

In Nov. ’07 when Google launched a unique system, OpenSocial, to bring all the social-networking sites and applications under one set of specifications, many companies were not very sure about its success. And, the platform — which facilitates various social-networking sites to function on a defined and consistent software platform — still needs a well definition. Despite that many such as Impetus, an outsourced software product engineering services company, went ahead and opted for the platform to write its applications. However, the company had some doubts initially. But this platform also enables the software-developer community to write applications for social networks, which would be inter-operable as well.

“While opting for the system, we were sure that in future every software company would want to embrace it. Because the biggest advantage of the system we noticed was that you have a bigger community talk with the only worry that the platform was new and ill defined. It encouraged us to assign five to eight software engineers at Impetus to work on it. Initially, we worked very closely with Google when we started with version 0.5. In fact, since the introduction of the platform, we have a team to write applications on OpenSocial. Now that we are using it increasingly, we have formally launched our team for this platform,” says Sanjeev Khodaskar, Manager, Software Engineer, Impetus Technologies.

For the last seven months Impetus is actively using OpenSocial to write its applications for commercial purposes, and the company has recently launched its internal dedicated practice group for Google's OpenSocial platform and its related technologies. This small group of five to 12 software engineers (with between one and five years of experience) is incubated as an initiative from Impetus’s R&D division, iLabs, and will focus on pursuing the technology and business aspects of the OpenSocial platform. The group with its expertise in writing OpenSocial Applications, OpenSocial widgets and Collaborative Application will help the company to create new paradigms for the social-networking domain. The company has also collaborated with one of its customers to showcase OpenSocial products for renowned technology events such the Orkut Hackathon, Web2.0 Expo.

“As of now, the group has written three applications, including a Web-based video conferencing and a game on social-networking Website, by using OpenSocial Platform,” Khodaskar added.
“As we are actively using this system at Impetus, I believe that OpenSocial Platform will rule the global software industry by 2010. Though the platform will take six months to gear up and to prove itself as a well-defined and flawless system for the global software vendors. Another drawback is that even though a lot of business is coming out of this, not many people are aware what ‘OpenSocial’ system is,” concluded Khodaskar.

Courtesy - Imrana Khan, Global Services Media