OpenSocial Week

I am on the plane, coming back from Sao Paulo, where we just ended a tour of two fully loaded OpenSocial weeks in Argentina and Brazil visiting five different cities: Tandil, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Porto Alegre and Campinas.

Like a rock band after a tour, all the team that made it possible from Globant, Google, Orkut, Hi5, MySpace, Vostu, Sonico, Joyent and Mentez now needs a rest, but I couldn’t wait to write a few lines about all the excitement surrounding it.

During these days we had the opportunity to share the power of OpenSocial with hundreds of students at ten universities and 600 marketing professionals in two big events. Social sites account for 50% of the top most visited 20 sites in each of these countries, and I must confess I was surprised by Orkut’s positioning as number 1 in Brazil, even ahead of Google search in Portuguese.  

We also organized a Hackaton at Globant Tech Park. During this event, 100 developers spent a day listening to tech talks, coding their apps and having a good time including lots of pizza and beer. The result was great: 14 apps have been demonstrated and some of them were really interesting.  

Certainly, this is a great opportunity to take the web to a next level. Applications in these networks are blooming every day by hundreds but we have just scratched the surface of what can be accomplished with this technology. While being bitten by a virtual vampire is something that could happen to you on the network, I can see hundreds of potential uses to solve real problems.

10,000 years ago, humans gathered together in established communities. But only recently, social networks allowed us to discover and regularly connect and collaborate with people outside our  vicinity. OpenSocial is now opening the doors to create applications reaching hundreds of millions of users by using a standard programming interface to run in a variety of networks. The network platform can at the same time enable them to spread as an epidemic. What is more important, is that this is opening a space for open innovation so this is a great opportunity for companies to engage with users in a much richer, bidirectional, relationship.

The potential is great and here at Globant we are at the forefront of making this technology widely adopted. From enabling some of the largest global networks to run OpenSocial, to creating highly scalable and appealing applications for corporations, and contributing to open-source implementations of the standard.

For more info I suggest you to visit the excellent blog of Patrick Chanezon from Google at http://wordpress.chanezon.com

Cheers,

Guibert