The Web has rapidly evolved into a dynamic, interactive and personalized experience where people establish an on-line presence and identity. Fueling this change is the explosive growth of social networking. As with many trends that started in the consumer space, business are looking to capitalize on this movement by creating their own highly interactive, personalized communities around their products and services. For example, WebMD[1] has started a new “Social Network” for its customers. WebMD chief Wayne Gattinella called it "a powerful new way to connect our 60 million monthly users to share their own experiences and personal wisdom across any area of health and wellness."[2]
As many of these companies build their communities, they are simply "rolling their own" solutions and frameworks. However, an emerging set of standards that include, OpenID (Open Identity), OAuth (Open Authorization), and OpenSocial provide a browser based component model that is inherently embeddable and portable, a consistent identity and authorization mechanism, and a well defined social information model. Used together, these standards create consistent Web 2.0 programming model for building and social applications.
Part of the OpenSocial specification is “gadgets”, which, are AJAX style components created using common Web technologies such as XML, HTML, CSS, Dojo, and Javascript. A key part of the inherent design of Gadgets is that they are easily embedded into external Web sites that implement the open the standard Web 2.0 programming model. This is a natural fit with SaaS offerings and allows business to maximize the reach of their offerings while controlling development costs.
This session will present the open Web 2.0 application model, and illustrate, via a demo, advanced cross-site integration and application embedding, and the advantages of the model’s inherent social characteristics.
[1] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/webmd-announces-new-health-social-networking-platform-on-webmdcom-87108667.html
[2] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/webmd-announces-new-health-social-networking-platform-on-webmdcom-87108667.html