Saturday, February 23, 2008

Opensocial Hackathon – Bangalore

I am feeling very happy to tell you all that I was a part of OpenSocial hackathon conducted by Google from 19th-22nd Feb. This hackathon was basically intended to build applications for Orkut using Opensocial.
Opensocial is a platform launched by Apache, Google and other Web masters. This platform provides API’s using which one can build applications for any Social Networking site. The main theme of this technology is “Build once, Run Anywhere!” Almost all the social networking sites are supporting this technology and have already started accepting applications from other WEB 2.0 companies. As a result of this the application builder giants like Slide, Rockyou have now more competitors since smaller companies have also entered the field.
It was great being a part of Google family for 4 days and understanding their work culture and strategies. Many experts from Google gave us tips and tricks on how to make applications look richer and performance oriented.
This initiative by Google and Apache will surely make WEB more social. Moreover, introduction of opensocial makes the race interesting in the social networking world, since now even smaller social networking sites like Hi5, Ning, MingleBox will be able to compete Facebook (the Giant). This has also opened up the market for Indian Startup’s too since during the hackathon I could see many start up companies participated with their social applications.
For the first two days we were cracking the logic and typing code under the guidance of Google experts where as the last two days were interesting since there was a presentation on the last where we presented our applications in front of the Google gang. There were altogether 13 applications whitelisted. It was gr8 to hear from them about our applications since we had a Q&A session after each presentation. The feedback from Google will be mailed to our respective companies shortly, which we’el be able to use for improving our applications. This application will be made open to millions of Orkut users by the end of February or early March. So, guys don’t miss out!. It was actually reverse outsourcing which worked great for both the host as well as the guests.
Special thanks to my company Experience Commerce and Mrs. Roopa Praveen who has always been an inspiration for me.

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