Brian MacCallister has proposed 2 weeks ago a new project for apache incubator. This project is called Shindig and has now an Apache page.

Here is an extract for the proposal :

= Abstract =

Shindig will develop a container and backend server components for hosting OpenSocial applications.

= Proposal =

Shindig will develop a JavaScript container and implementations of the backend APIs and proxy required for hosting OpenSocial applications.

= Background =

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create social applications that use a social network's friends and update feeds.

A social application, in this context, is an application run by a third party provider and embedded in a web page, or web application, which consumes services provided by the container and by the application host. This is very similar to Portal/Portlet technology, but is based on client-side compositing, rather than server.

More information can be found about OpenSocial at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/




Google has also started an OpenSocial container implementation : http://code.google.com/p/opensocial-container-sample/ but both projects seem to try to make effort to be merged in Shindig.