What are the social network giants of the world doing all gathered in the conference room of the British Telecom in London? Easy: they are revolutionizing the internet. On April 6th 2008 Google organized a one-day hackathon (a hack-marathon) for its project Opensocial. As Ciaopeople's application development manager I attended the conference, and despite all the beer provided by Google, I am still able to talk about it. London, with its 300 languages, dozens of ethnicities and 20 underground lines thickly interconnected, is the perfect city for such a gathering.



Opensocial Google's Blog reported:

The event will start at 11am and go as long as people can still type. We'll provide all the food you need (included pizza and beer), as well as a strong wireless network and power outlets.

In an attempt to not look bad and avert any prejudices against Italians about the dilated conception of space and time when it comes to appointments? I was there at 10am, an hour early. It turned out I was the first to arrive and I got to attend Google's sound check for about an hour with the British Telecom staff, and assist the organization of the welcome ceremony. Slowly people started to arrive and we mingled surrounded by liters of English tea, coffee and croissants. After breakfast, the actual conference started, we connected to British Telecom wi-fi and we all moved to the conference room.

Dan Peterson, Opensocial product manager, presented the program for the day and then proceeded to introduce the guest speakers: from the developers of MySpace, to the folks from Netlog, from the technical staff from Xing to the very experienced staff from Last.fm, as well as smaller giants like Orkut, Hyves and Studi VZ.

After the presentations on the respective platforms and intentions on the possibilities offered by Open Social, the actual phase of coding commenced: coordinated by Cassie Doll from the Google team we spent the following hours (until 6.30 p.m. and beyond) testing some social-widgets with the Javascript code. At the end of the afternoon it was time for the demo: the various developers illustrated the functions of their applications: widget, for mini-wikis management, to access the musical profile on Myspace or the one on Last.fm? simple prototypes, just drafts, but definitely impressive considering their power.

Indeed, if web2.0 has granted outsiders the possibility to manage their presence on the web with a myriad of Content Management Systems and Social Networks, then the new frontier in the world wide web will soon be the possibility to insert, in your own webpage, small widgets: mini-applications that will instantly personalize the graphics and functions of pages. It is something like what we see on iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, empowered by the relations among social network users.

Let's imagine for instance, a widget that shows your friends how much you have in common in terms of musical tastes (using last.fm's data), or if you've read the same books (using anobii.com) or if you like the same movies (see flixster.com). The scenarios are potentially endless and only as limited as the creativity of users/programmers. With Javascript, anybody will be able to program and share through the web, whether its a small videogame, a news reader or a widget to manage a guestbook, and it will be possible to rest assured that it will work on all the websites joining the Opensocial Foundation: potentially an audience of millions and millions of users will share the same applications and the same contents, enlarging the concept of hypertext versus that of social hypertext; let's get ready for the advent of the widget economy!

Once we returned to the conference room, following the mini-conferences of different demos, we found a nice surprise: dozens of pizzas and drinks for everyone! At that moment a thought came to my mind: "I'm feeling lucky", but I didn't say so to British Telecom and Google's staffs, for obvious reasons. We were afraid there were too many; there were literally dozens of pizza boxes, but I have to say that very few were left without being devoured! The hackathon then took a different turn. Social networking went from being digital to becoming real and we started to kid around, laugh, the atmosphere was very relaxed and almost reach delirium when upon Google's invitation we all headed for Lord Raglan's Pub, a few meters away from the convention site. Liters and liters of beer to digest dozens of notions on javascript, PHP, RESTful greedily devoured throughout the afternoon (as well as, ahem, the pizza?)

At that point, amidst toasts and pool games, the hackathon had made it clear to everybody that the real strength of social networking is not in this or that web architecture, in a program language rather than in a particular server. The real strength of every social network is the people, their desire to know each other, to interactt to learn how to share. In these terms, London's Google Hackathon was an amazing experience which besides introducing our minds to new horizons for social networking technologies, also strengthened the desire to test ourselves and cooperate.

In London, on April 6th, while we were discussing the future of social networking, the Olympic torch passed through: we like to see it as the metaphor of the Opensocial horizon. When it comes down to it, the Olympic Games can be seen as a very old and marvelous social network, whose roots are found in the times in which Seneca affirmed Man is a social animal. The Olympic Torch crossing the city was a wonderful coincidence and a good omen; it is too bad that we, from Ciaopeople, were the only Italians there.

Where were the others?

Dario Caregnato

application development manager