Google’s Orkut has started accepting social applications, letting the first OpenSocial app developers submit their apps for use by 50 million Orkut users. The completed apps must be submitted by Friday in order to be ready when the apps are rolled out to users later this month. Interested developers can participate in Orkut Hackathons Thursday and Friday in the Googleplex, and via teleconference in Google New York.
TechCrunch has written about how OpenSocial was hacked, with security vulnerabilities exposed twice with barely half an hour of work each time. It’s never fun to see a platform hacked, but this doesn’t imply a systemic problem with OpenSocial. Because OpenSocial uses regular old web standards for practically everything, the same vulnerabilities that web developers have to worry about, OpenSocial has to worry about.
In Google’s rush to get OpenSocial ready, it may have left a backdoor open. In their rush to have the first web apps released, the iLike and RockYou applications might have been released with openings for hackers to get in. In time, these won’t be a problems, but application developers need to work harder to lock down their code so this doesn’t happen often.
There’s been a lot of stuff going on about OpenSocial, and so you don’t have to read everything on the internet, I’ve done it for you (and still found 86 seconds of time to pay attention to the wife).
Who’s using OpenSocial? These guys have signed on:
Wait, is that a lot? 
This video is from Google’s Thursday night “Campfire” event, introducing OpenSocial, and introducing the OpenSocial partners to each other (since the project was so secret that no one knew who else was in);
Here are more Campfire highlights:
Here’s a weird one: Just as Google’s announcing OpenSocial, it lunches an Orkut-only application, an ask-your-friends application similar to a recently added LinkedIn feature and a common Facebook app. You can use it to ask a community question to your friends or the entire Orkut network. The app, available here, isn’t an OpenSocial one, it runs on the Orkut platform, code-named Mobius. Why not make it OpenSocial?
The Orkut Sandbox, for running and testing OpenSocial applications, is live now, and you can see one developer’s experience with it.
Valleywag’s was running charts on Wednesday, when it seemed like OpenSocial’s biggest partners were Orkut and LinkedIn, showing how Google’s network paled in comparison to the mammoth market share of Facebook. Then, on Friday, they had to run a new chart showing how the full network, including surprise addition MySpace, has more than six times the market share of Facebook in the U.S..
Plaxo is the first (or the first non-Orkut site) to support OpenSocial, giving interested developers a place to have their applications run, even if the OpenSocial standard is at 0.5 and is hardly set in stone. Plaxo users can add OpenSocial gadgets to their profile, gadgets get a full canvas page inside Pulse profiles, complete support for profiles and friend-list APIs, activity stream and activity data can be published by gadgets, and activities can receive comments in Plaxo Pulse.
Ning went live with OpenSocial a bit later.
Bebo, the major U.K. social network, is playing both sides, both joining OpenSocial and developing a tool for Facebook application developers to port their Facebook apps to Bebo. If Bebo becomes truly compatible with both Facebook and OpenSocial, it won’t be giving up its British crown anytime soon.
Meanwhile, Facebook is launching some sort of integrated sales data/advertising network. Basically, online stores will send Facebook purchasing information of Facebook users, and if those users choose to allow it, their purchases will be shown to their friends in their News Feed. Besides the giant privacy concerns, and the need to get commerce sites to play along (with the success of the whole thing depending on it integrating with actual important stores), there’s the Microsoft thing to consider, since MS is supposed to be Facebook’s ad network. Wait till this one gets announced, supposedly Tuesday, and I’ll probably have thoughts on InsideMicrosoft.
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