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It's still not up to 1.0, but Google on Wednesday announced completion of version 0.8 of OpenSocial, a standard for building social applications on the Web.

One notable difference with OpenSocial 0.8 is the addition of the RESTful API. This addition lets a wider variety of software beside just Web-based widgets running in JavaScript interact with the servers running social applications. For example, it would permit a program running on Windows or on a mobile phone, but not in a Web browser, tap into a social application.

OpenSocial began at Google, but the company won allies for it. Web heavyweights including MySpace.com and Yahoo joined Google to manage the technology through the OpenSocial Foundation. OpenSocial is one theme getting heavy emphasis at the first Google I/O conference in San Francisco on Wednesday and Thursday.

The technology consists of a number of standardized Web programming interfaces called APIs; with OpenSocial, a developer can more easily write a single application that runs on several different Web sites.

Programmers are working on building OpenSocial 0.8 support into Apache Shindig, an open-source project that can endow servers with OpenSocial support, Dan Peterson, a Google product manager, said in a blog posting. "Expect to see containers supporting it in the coming weeks and months," he said.

Other changes beside the RESTful API are documented in the OpenSocial 0.8 release notes.

Update 2:10 p.m. PDT: I added Google comment about its ad quality requirements.

Google will overhaul its iGoogle interface in June and give people a way to advertise on its personalized home page service, the company said.

The ads will be an option for iGoogle's "canvas view," which lets iGoogle applications expand to fill the whole browser screen, Google said Tuesday on its iGoogle developer blog.

"Those of you with existing applications should add a canvas view to take advantage of more screen real estate. And using canvas view, you can also monetize with ads," said Dan Holevoet of Google's developer programs group, on the blog.

It won't be an ad free-for-all, though.

"Ads will be limited to the canvas view only and certain types of ads will not be allowed. Developers are free to use any ad provider," said iGoogle senior product manager Jessica Ewing in a statement. "To maintain the best user experience, we plan on surveying users to determine how ads impact user satisfaction. Poor user ratings and reviews may impact a gadget's viral features, ranking, and directory listing."

And Google wants to be sure ads aren't inadvertently clicked, a problem in the regular non-canvas view. "We don't allow advertising in the home view (small gadget view) because the gadget real-estate is limited and we've noticed that many clicks in that space are in error," Ewing said.

In April, Google launched a "sandbox" to let developers try the canvas view along with an iGoogle interface change that adds a left-hand navigation pane with a user's list of Web site gadgets.

Later this summer, Holevoet said, Google will add the OpenSocial API to iGoogle. OpenSocial is a cooperative effort including several Google rivals that lets programmers create Web site applications that can run on any OpenSocial-enabled site.

Also coming later this summer are iGoogle updates and notifications, where for example an application can notify a user's friends of some event such as a new high score in a game.

Google engineering director David Glazer, right, talks to Matt Waddell at the Campfire One event at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Behind him is the skull of a T. Rex skeleton.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Maybe it was because Google preaching to the social-networking choir, or maybe it was the toasty campfires and hot cocoa, but demonstrations of Google's new Friend Connect service seemed generally well received Monday night.

Google executives showed off the technology, a Google-hosted application that designed to let Web site coders easily add social features to their sites, at the company's third Campfire One event at the company's headquarters here. Previous debuts at the events were of two other significant developer-oriented software technologies, OpenSocial and App Engine.

Program manager Mussie Shore gave the central demonstration sprucing up a guacamole-lovers' site with the ability to let users join as members, comment, post photos, rate recipes, and spread word of those activities to contacts on existing social-networking sites LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, or hi5.

Ingrid Michaelson webmaster Jenny Begin and Nat Brown, CTO of iLike, show Friend Connect enhancements they made to the Ingrid Michaelson Web page.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

Google Friend Connect employs several more-or-less standard networking technologies--OpenSocial as a foundation for richer Web applications; OpenID to handle login chores; OAuth to let users approve the grafting of new branches onto their existing social networks such as Facebook. It's yet another option in the complicated and fast-changing set of alliances and standards efforts in the social-networking domain.

Attendees I spoke to generally waxed positive about it. And Don MacAskill, Chief Executive of photo-sharing site SmugMug, said he'd be interested in trying it out.

In his demo, Shore picked some social applications from an online catalog, tweaked minor parameters such as background color, clicked a button to generate a few lines of JavaScript, copied it into his Web page, and exercised the new features on the revamped Web site.

Program manager Mussie Shore demonstrates Friend Connect. Key to the process is the 'generate code' button that produces some JavaScript that can be copied into a Web site.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

Shore touts the benefits of Friend Connect.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

The crowd settles in at Google's third Campfire One event in the Googleplex courtyard.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

The Googleplex by night. Yes, the roof is crooked.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

SAN FRANCISCO--MySpace's courtship of developers officially started Tuesday evening with a winter beach party, an open bar, and mac and cheese.

When you think about it, it's a cheap date for the amount of money MySpace--and its potential partners--hope to make from the social network's new developer platform, which allows third-party applications like music-sharing service iLike to reach millions of new users. And to survey the crowd here at MySpace's San Francisco offices, where the company launched its new platform and online forums, application developers were already smitten with the idea. The free booze and comfort foods were just a bonus.

Max Levchin, CEO of Slide, one of the Web's largest makers of widgets, called the party a love fest because MySpace is finally giving outsiders the chance to make money on advertising from its enormous traffic.

"This is an enormous step to make companies like Slide more significant economic engines and not just engines of reach," Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal, said in an interview at the party.

A look at MySpace's developer site.

(Credit: MySpace)

Slide, for example, draws as much as 143 million unique visitors a month for its collection of widgets and applications, including Slideshows, which lets people display photos on MySpace and Facebook. He said the bulk of those 143 million visitors come from MySpace, where Slide hasn't been able to profit from use of its tools the way it has from the no. 2 social network Facebook, which lets third parties sell ads against their tools. Starting in March, Slide will be able to display ads on a standalone "canvas" page of a member's site and collect 100 percent of that revenue, similar to Facebook.

More than money, MySpace is attempting to build up the kind of thriving hub of developers that have surrounded Facebook since it opened its social network last May. So many entrepreneurs are looking to capitalize on the viral, social-swapping nature of Facebook that Stanford University even offered a class last semester on how to develop applications for it. Jim Benedetto, MySpace's senior vice president of tech operations, said that with the launch of its open developer platform, Stanford professor David McClure, who was at the party, plans to change his class so that it catered to MySpace apps, too.

"With OpenSocial (the set of application tools that drives MySpace's new open platform) there's no need for developers to learn proprietary code so they can create applications for our site," Benedetto said, referring to Facebook. He said that OpenSocial will allow anyone to easily port their application from MySpace to rival Beebo, for example.

Benedetto said that starting Tuesday, application makers will have a month to build their tools for MySpace; then in March, the company will unleash them to members. He said they expect to have thousands of new applications that will likely be more personalized than on other social networks. For example, a widget maker could create a tool for personalized calendars on a MySpace user homepage.

But back to the money, Benedetto said that developers will be able to sell ads or sponsorships of their own for each user's "canvas page," or where the application lives within a MySpace member page. Down the road, MySpace plans to help developers make money from ads with its beta service "hypertargeting," a system for displaying graphical ads on a page based on the member's personal tastes described in his or her profile, he said.

Joe Greenstein, co-founder and CEO of movie-ratings site Flixster, said he is developing a tool for MySpace, and so far, he's impressed with the platform. He's particularly excited about the opportunity to cater to the largest social network in the United States.

"More audience equals more money," Greenstein said at the party.

For his part, Levchin said that Slide would likely develop some new applications of its own for MySpace that cater to its younger, more entertainment-focused audience (as opposed to Facebook's older, more utilitarian crowd). But he would not detail the company's plans.

Whatever they are, they seem big. "It's pretty exciting now to be a widget company. We are the operating system of the future," Levchin said.

(Credit: Hitwise)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this graph from Hitwise is worth a thousand page views. The graph shows the market share of visits to all OpenSocial members combined versus Facebook. Clearly, Google's OpenSocial is a force to be reckoned with.

The question, however, is just what we're supposed to do with it. Thus far, I can't really understand what I'm supposed to do with Facebook. Google's OpenSocial has brought me no closer to grokking the nirvana that has apparently been unleashed. Jack Schofield in The Guardian gives two good reasons why:

First, as far as I can see, it's just a widget format, i.e. Google Gadgets. I'm sure there is value to having a common Google-sponsored widget format for mini-applications, because it reduces the amount of work needed to put Vampires or whatever on different social-networking sites. But really, who cares?

Second, I can't see what's open about it. Sure anybody can write apps for it, but anybody can write apps for Facebook, or, indeed, Windows. ... Read more

Borrowing a page from Sun's Java playbook, Google is announcing a way for programmers to build social applications for multiple Web sites at once.

Google's version of this "write once run anywhere" concept is called OpenSocial, a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) that will enable developers to create applications for social networks, blogs and any Web sites that accept the OpenSocial code. Currently, developers have to write new programs for each site, even if the functionality will be the same on each site.

This initiative "marks the first time that multiple social networks have been made accessible under a common API," according to a Google statement.

This announcement illustrates how Google is courting developers and possibly attempting to outdo Facebook in openness. Facebook opened up its platform to developers in June and the site was immediately flooded with all sorts of useful and not-so-useful apps. Google, Yahoo and others have been heavily espousing the beauty of open platforms and making moves to that end.

Not surprisingly, Facebook, which recently reportedly chose Microsoft over Google for an exclusive ad and investment deal, is not one of the OpenSocial-enabled sites.

Google's social network, Orkut, is among the sites that will accept apps written using OpenSocial APIs, as is LinkedIn, hi5, Ning, Friendster and Plaxo. Other partners include iLike, Slide, Oracle and Salesforce.com.

A Google representative would not say whether Google had talked to Facebook and MySpace about joining the initiative or comment on why they were not involved.

The OpenSocial resources for developers and Web sites will be available at code.google.com/apis/opensocial.