Hello Developers

As promised, I wanted to follow up with a post regarding some exciting features of our Platform we are focusing our efforts on.  First off, Rhonda enumerated a list of known bugs and work-arounds and I'm happy to report that our current stage builds have fixes for the majority of those issues. We really appreciate your patience over the last couple of weeks and we're working hard to keep the platform as bug-free as possible.
 
OpenSocial .8 Support

This is our primary development effort right now and our next major release will give you the ability to select the referenced OpenSocial JS library version.  You can test and iterate the development version of your app to the new library before publishing live.  Some of the new OpenSocial enhancements, both in the specification and our support, include:

• Enhanced Person object with new fields such as hasApp and networkPresence and sub structures such as bodyType Persistence data is now treated as JSON with greater control over escaping
• Enhanced support for App Xml, including UserPref elements, which allows you to define a set of typed fields in which we will provide a UI on the canvas for each user of your app to manage.  You can read the current users values from either the REST API or the JS library.
• OpenSocial REST API resources which will be prefixed with api.myspace.com/v2.  No worries, we will continue to support our existing REST API resources!

New Permission Model (aka "OpenCanvas")

We are simplifying our permission model to allow users to control whether or not applications can read their Basic Info on the canvas page without having to install or "add" the application.  We are very excited about this as we believe this will give you the opportunity to create a very engaging experience with users.  Users can still "Add" the application and choose whether or not the app renders on their home or profile and with the requestPermission OpenSocial JS function, the app can prompt the user for greater access to their data including updating their mood/status, access to their contact info/extended profile information, access to their public/private photos, send notifications, upload photos, publish activities, etc.

Did you say Upload Photos?

Yes, a new photo upload API will allow you to upload photos to user's photo albums.  You can send multi-part/form POST or simply reference a URL to an image.


Did you say Publish Activities?

We are putting the finishing touches on Custom App Activities.  We know you have been waiting a long time for this and we have received the go ahead to allow publishing of your app activities to friends of the user, not just users of the application.
 

Easier Developer Workflow

There has been a lot of confusion with our App editor and we will be simplifying it to alleviate the confusion between external site applications and internal OpenSocial applications.  Internationalization support will be enhanced allowing you to define various languages for the title, descript and icons and target specific countries.

As always, feedback is welcome!
 

~Paul