OpenSocial for Business

Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Enterprise Partner Team

Last night's OpenSocial announcement highlighted the simple idea that the web becomes more valuable for users when they can more easily interact with friends and colleagues.

OpenSocial supports this by providing a common set of APIs between a social application and a website. Developers can reach a broad set of OpenSocial-enabled websites using a single HTML/JavaScript-based API, and websites can tap in to the creative energy of a large pool of third party app developers.

As members of Google's Enterprise team, we have a particular passion for serving business users and use cases, which is why we're extra-excited about the business apps OpenSocial will enable.

In fact, in addition to the support announced last night by folks like LinkedIn, Viadeo, and Oracle, we're proud that several Google Enterprise professional partners participated in last night's announcement with demos to preview how OpenSocial will help businesses:

• Salesforce.com demonstrated its platform support as an OpenSocial-enabled website (video, demo about three quarters in)
  
• Theikos and Appirio created OpenSocial apps that run inside Salesforce.com
• LimitNone's iBuild app can now add OpenSocial-powered features to its Gadget-based apps

iBuild empowers non-technical users to create lightweight apps that run as Google Gadgets in iGoogle. Apps like team to-do lists or shared contact managers in a business context or tracking sports teams in a consumer context come to mind. And now, by adding OpenSocial support, those apps can take advantage of social features like publishing actions to activity streams in any OpenSocial-enabled site.

Appirio's Google Gadget Builder for Salesforce.com, which currently allows you to display dynamic "dashboards" of Salesforce.com data on iGoogle, will take a similar approach by incorporating OpenSocial-powered features.

Both developers and users win because these products will work across a growing number of OpenSocial-enabled sites.

If you're a developer and would like to learn more about OpenSocial applications for business, you can start today by signing up for an Orkut or Salesforce.com OpenSocial sandbox account. The list of OpenSocial websites for business will grow over time, but these two early adopters enable you to start exploring today.