I first began developing social applications when Facebook opened up its developer
platform in 2007, giving people like me a taste of the extensive social data that an
application can use to improve growth and target personalization settings. At the time,
I was building social fantasy sports applications for CBSSports.com, pulling user information
to enrich that fantasy sports data into a highly personalized state.
It wasn’t until 2008, when I joined the partner integrations team in the Yahoo! Developer
Network, that I got my first peek at an open source approach to social application
development through OpenSocial. What attracted me to OpenSocial was not the fact
that you could build an application once and deploy to numerous OpenSocial containers
(which proved to be a faulty notion), but rather that through an open source
approach I could build social applications on a container and understand how these
platforms worked from a core level. I developed a deep drive to explore how the relationships
that people form on the Web can enrich and personalize their online lives.
This was the starting point of my career advocating open source social technologies.
OpenSocial was the gateway specification for me, leading me to explore the Shindig
OpenSocial container, OpenID and OAuth (for authentication and authorization,
respectively), the third-party code security technologies Caja and ADSafe, and newer
distributed web framework specifications like Activity Streams, PubSubHubbub, and
the Open Graph protocol. I quickly came to realize that there was a wide range of open
source technologies to enable the construction of rich social frameworks. These technologies
and specifications built rich layers of functionality in a simple way using very
open methodologies.