MySpace Developer Team News and Announcements : Activities

New Features for OpenSocial 0.9 REST APIs

krunal — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:38:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

We are extending our 0.9 REST API offerings by adding new endpoints as well as adding new features to existing endpoints to make our 0.9 offering richer. We are committed to exposing data through Open Standards so app developers can create the finest applications on the web. Some of these new features are not part of the previous MySpace REST APIs so this should encourage you to switch to 0.9 if you haven’t done so already.

The link to the main resource page for REST 0.9 APIs is located here. Please find documentation links and highlights of these new features below. Please review our Terms of use, especially Section 10.2, before you start using these features.

New Endpoints

StatusMoodComments

This endpoint provides a way to fetch the comments posted on a user’s StatusMood updates. It also provides a way to request the comment author’s basic info (image, name and profile URL) along with the comments themselves. This could reduce the number of calls to the server you need to make if you plan on displaying the commenter’s data along with the comments.

Please see details here.

ProfileComments

This provides a way to fetch the comments posted on a user’s profile. It also provides a way to request the comment author’s basic info along with the comments, which again will reduce the number of calls to the server if that information is needed.

Please see details here.

MediaItemComments
You can now fetch comments posted on a user’s images and videos. Again, this endpoint allows you to fetch the comment author’s basic info to save a second request to the server.

Please see details here.

Enhancements

StatusMood

The StatusMood endpoints now offer APIs to fetch friends’ status mood updates as well as provides a way to fetch StatusMood history.
Apps can also fetch recent comments on a user status in the same call.
MySpace now allows syncing/updating StatusMood from various sources like Twitter. You can get that information in your requests.

Check the documentation for the StatusMood APIs here.

Also don’t forget to check out the filters that this endpoint has to offer.

Activities

We are also adding Activity Streams extension properties to activities returned from our OpenSocial 0.9 Activities endpoint in this release. Activity Streams is a data format that describes what people are doing around the web, for example: posting photos and videos, sharing music with friends and writing blog entries. If you are already familiar with the Activity Streams atom format, you can now access all the Activity Streams goodness, like actors, verbs, objects and object-types, in JSON and plain old XML. Find more information about Activity Streams on the http://activitystrea.ms web site.

Check out the MySpace implementation for the same here.

SDKs

Our PHP and Java SDKs have been updated to support these new features and the others are in the works. Also, these new features are developed using Open Standards like OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial which should help make your experience smooth.

Also, if you have missed out, visit this earlier blog post for more information about complete suite of REST 0.9 APIs.

Happy coding!

What's New in MySpace OpenSocial 0.8

Chad Russell — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:09:00 GMT

The spec for OpenSocial 0.8 has been finalized and MySpace’s implementation has been released. There are some key benefits that 0.8 adds over 0.7 on the MySpace platform. The JavaScript container more closely conforms to the spec and some MySpace specific extensions have been pulled into the OpenSocial namespace. The result of this is that your 0.8 app will port much more easily to other platforms than your 0.7 app did. The app data API has been cleaned up and made more useful.

There are also important new features and capabilities on the MySpace platform that are only available to 0.8 apps:

Open Canvas allows your app to be functional for users even before they have added the app. Learn more about Open Canvas
Custom App Activities allow 0.8 apps to post activities into user Friend Updates. Learn more about Custom App Activities
App Notifications will allow apps to message their users directly, and will only be available on 0.8

In this three part series of articles, I’ll walk you through the process of creating an application from start to finish with emphasis on the six major improvements that distinguish 0.8 from 0.7 on MySpace:

Enhancements to the opensocial.Person object
Our new permission model, dubbed Open Canvas, that makes extensive use of opensocial.hasPermission and opensocial.requestPermission
Updates to app data to accept only valid JSON
The deprecation of PostTo in favor of opensocial.requestShareApp and opensocial.requsetSendMessage
Activities
App Notifications

Read What's New in MySpace OpenSocial 0.8:

Invites, Open Canvas, and Activities

Kyle Brinkman — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:18:00 GMT

Happy holidays! As an early present I'm pleased to report that we've released a bunch of new capabilities that should really help users engage with your apps on MDP. First up is App Invites: previously when users added apps via an invitation, the invite disappeared and users were presented with a link to the app. Now, users are immediately taken to the app when they accept invites. We got lots of requests for this change, and expect it will make it clearer and easier for people to start using the applications their friends have recommended

We're also releasing today the first stages of our Open Canvas implementation. As we've discussed previously, Open Canvas allows MySpace members to use an app canvas page prior to explicitly adding the app. You can read full details on how Open Canvas works, but the point I want to emphasize is that this capability is entirely optional. Users can still add and interact with your applications entirely as before, but you now have more options for engaging with users prior to installation. We're excited to see creative implementations of Open Canvas and look forward to feedback from you guys on further development.

Finally, I also have good news on App Activities. Several weeks ago we released Custom App Activities, a new capability on MDP that allows apps to raise events, including text, links, and media, that appear in Friend Updates on members' home pages. At that time we limited the service to developers of an app in order to allow you guys to test out the functionality in advance and help us work out any bugs. As of today we've opened up the service to allow your apps to raise events for all users!

Learn how to create and publish activity templates.

Activities are a great way to deepen engagement. Raising events allows users to broadcast to their friends all the cool things they're doing on your apps, from winning a hand at poker, to rating a new movie or completing a quiz. Like all user-to-user communications on MDP, each event must be approved by the initiating user. We feel this is the best way to balance message volume, rather than relying on black-box quotas or other filtering systems.

Here's an example of an approval modal for an activity raised by an application and the resulting event in a friends Updates:

The MDP team has worked really hard to get these features out before the holidays, and we hope this rings in the new year on a good note for everyone.

Happy New Year!

/kyle

Beta Release of the MySpace Custom Application Activities

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:18:00 GMT

As part of the OpenSocial 0.8 release , we're proud to announce a Developer Only release of MySpace Custom Application Activities. App Activities allow developers to get app-related events and messages into the Friends Update feed that appears on a user's home page.

What does a custom app activity event look like? Here's a portion of my Friend Update feed:

As a developer, you'll be able to define your Activity Templates and then raise events using those templates in your OpenSocial applications. If you want to skip the chit-chat, you can get started right away by going to the template editor.

A templatelink appear under each app on the developers My Apps section. See screen shot below:

App Activities Key Limitations:

1. Only developers of the apps can successfully raise activity events.
2. Only developers of the apps will see the activity events in their Friend Updates feeds.
3. Apps can raise activity events *without* triggering the Activity Permissions pop-up

Point #3 is important because when Activitiesgo live, users of the apps will get a pop-up asking for their permission to notify their friends about the activity. This should have implications in developer's design decisions on when and how frequently to raise activity events.

Limitations, Restrictions and Known Issues

There is a full list of limitations, restrictions and bugs on the Activities Forum.

Getting Started with the Editor

The template editor is your primary point of interaction for defining activity templates. The template editor allows you to define and preview templates, and provides sample JavaScript for use in your apps. The variables and media items are only used for previewing your events. Please see the Getting Started documentation for a full walkthrough.

Raising the event

The code sample below shows how to raise the event. (We are using some jQuery constructions here, but you probably be able to see what is going on).

function opt_callBack(response){
//only for developers, on a developers template we will give you some detailed error info back!
if (response.hadError()){
//using some jQuery magic
$("#status").append("<span style='color:red'>" + response.getErrorMessage() + "</span>");
}
}

We are looking forward to your feedback,

Marco, @nkur, Jitesh and the full MDP team.