The Social Web at Google I/O 2010

Google I/O attendees and speakers this year had the opportunity to participate in some fascinating and important conversations around the social web. The Developer Sandbox featured 16 companies on hand to talk about their social efforts, including Atlassian, eBay, IBM, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Plaxo, Playfish, Yahoo!, and Voxeo.

In addition, nine sessions on social topics took place during the 2-day conference -- dealing with everything from real-time streams to OpenSocial in the enterprise. Of particular emphasis were open standards such as ActivityStreams, PubSubHubbub, OAuth, Salmon, and Webfinger that are fast becoming the foundational technologies for a more open and social web. The Google Buzz API was announced and covered in detail. And, of course, a deep look was taken at the future of the social web.

This is a big year for the social web, and we hope that the videos and slides from each session will expand your knowledge of and engagement with these exciting ideas and technologies:

• Fireside chat with the Social Web team - Rockstars of the Social Web team at Google gather to talk with attendees about a truly open and social web.


• What's the hubbub about Google Buzz APIs? - Chris Chabot introduces the Google Buzz API and provides a deep dive on the open standards it uses such as ActivityStreams, PubSubHubbub, OAuth, Salmon, and WebFinger, and demonstrates how to build your own apps on top of the API.


• Surf the stream: Google Buzz, location, and social gaming - Bob Aman and Timothy Jordan continue the Google Buzz API party with Buzz Bingo, a social game built on App Engine and Google Buzz.


• iGoogle developer portal and tools - The iGoogle Gadget Dashboard and the OpenSocial Development Environment are introduced by Shih-chia Cheng and Albert Cheng to help you build and maintain better OpenSocial gadgets for iGoogle.


• Make your application real-time with PubSubHubbub - Atom and RSS feeds are even more valuable when they’re pushed to subscribers in real-time. In this session, Brett Slatkin (Google) and Julien Genestoux (Superfeedr) show you how to implement PubSubHubbub for better stream publishing and consumption.


• The open & social web - Chris Messina uses a cartoon narrative to tell the epic story of Jack and Kate, explaining how immigration, staying in touch, and sharing rich media relate to emerging technologies like OpenID, WebFinger, and publishing technologies like PubSubHubbub, ActivityStreams, and Salmon.


• Bridging the islands: Building fluid social experiences across websites - Once you’ve seen Chris Messina’s talk on the open & social web, you’re bound to ask how you connect your site to the rest of the Social Web to increase traffic, engagement, and relevance. John Panzer and Joseph Smarr give you the answer: by adopting the awesome open technologies described in this talk!


• Where is the social web going next? - Kara Swisher moderates a panel of leading experts from LinkedIn, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and MySpace debating issues like privacy and providing their best guesses at the direction of the foundational technologies of the social web.


• Best practices for implementing OpenSocial in the Enterprise - Experts in the deployment of OpenSocial in the enterprise gather to talk implementation and best practices as well as review existing challenges.

You can also find all the Social Web I/O 2010 session videos on this YouTube playlist.

We had a great time at Google I/O this year and look forward to a long and fruitful discussion of everything social as we continue to work hard at making the the web more social, and the social web more open. Stay tuned to our progress on the Google Social Web Blog

By Timothy Jordan, Developer Relations