OpenSocial - Session1 by pat

For any Social networking site there are couple of objectives that the owner needs to keep in mind

1. What is the objective of the social network, meaning what problem the site is addressing
2. What are the verbs...such as share/buy/sell/connect etc
3. How ca people share the object? objects such as photos like Flickr, Music like iLike etc
4. What is the incentive for the users to share these objects?
5. Who are you charging?meaning where do you get money?

- Social Graph -> Friends/Profiles/Activities

There is a book suggested by Pat. This book is written by an economist in Google, Hal Varian, 10years back. The title of the book is Information Rules.

- Pat says OpenSocial is an API focused on People&Friends, Activities and Persistance.

- There are couple of options for the social network builders. Use EC2, Joyant of Google App Engine to build the site

- Companies like Salesforce.com and Oracle are building social network sites with OpenSocial API. This is the extend enterprises are using social networks.

- Social networks fall into one of the following categories

1. Viewers + Friends
2. Owner + Friends

- In the CRM case, it is more like Customer + partners.