Thursday, January 17, 2008

Opensocial v0.6 On Orkut!

Orkut implemented opensocial late yesterday, but not without issues.

The latest push is causing quite a few issues as Google's Orkut Sandbox was updated late yesterday to use the 0.6 version of the Opensocial API.

Preliminary tests show many apps not functioning at all ( Google's proxies are returning a 404 error ). The error seems to be caused by including specific iGoogle features ( eg <Require feature='minimessage' /> ). Google hasn't commented on this issue, but we believe it to be an Orkut error which should be corrected soon.

The welcomed news is that this push seems to have corrected the Internet Explorer issues we've been seeing since the beginning.

A couple of our beta apps (the ones that weren't affected by the new 404 error) are functioning just fine in IE. This is good news considering the complete lack of IE support thus far.

Orkut's profile view is now only allowing (3) applications, which will help speed up some of the slow page load times we've seen in the Sandbox (due to numerous applications on each profile). Orkut has also added options to move application position up/down on the profile view.

Unfortunately, Orkut is now not parsing the screenshot or app description correctly, as seen below: The updated viewer object security has yet to create any issues that we can see, which is surprising. It's important to remember, however, that each container will implement it's own security policy.

Here's a screenshot of Orkut's new App Authorization Page: In the end, this push was chaos at best.

Update: Most of the major bugs seem to have been ironed out on Orkut, and none too soon. The 0.7 push is slated for this Friday, February 1, 2008.

Opensocial 0.7 was supposed to be baked enough for launch, however, ~~we haven't caught wind of any news related to any public launch~~.

At any rate, most developers should probably treat 0.7 much more seriously than the 0.6 push ( which was a messy transition to the Shindig project ).

Update (02/05/08): The 0.7 push is underway! Google has announced that Opensocial will go live on Orkut at the end of this month.