[lindner]

So many thoughts about OpenSocial and the reference implementation, Shindig. I have it thank for my time at hi5, LinkedIn and then Google.

Some little known facts about OpenSocial

- Hangouts Apps (remember those?) were based on OpenSocial containers.

- OpenSocial powered the LinkedIn Apps Platform and Labs for a number of years. The team built Rails and Node apps and deployed on Joyent.

- Eric Schmidt gave a pep talk to the working group pre-launch and mentioned about how open always wins in the end...

- MySpace was concerned about the attack surface of 3p apps running in iframes. They toyed with the idea of requiring a webkit browser plugin to run apps (!). It did lead to Caja* as a project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caja_project

- The work on OpenSocial led in small part to the Activity Streams spec which led to ActivityPub and thus the latest Fediverse protocols. I like to think of OpenSocial as dead, but a good organ donor.

Fun times...

[spullara]

Amusingly a lot of the concerns about embedding applications in other web applications have finally been mostly covered by the browsers adding the capability to sandbox iframes. We used Caja at Yahoo but it was a nightmare at the time.

https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-i...

[mnewbould]

Hey Paul/Ben-

Always enjoyed working with you both, and sitting on panels teaching. Small world, I'm back working with Dave Recordon again.

I'd love for all the hard work that was left on the table to get resurrected, I continued to work in Caja-style JS sandboxing for a few years after OpenSocial.

Cheers, :max

[dotBen]

Hey Paul, long time - I enjoyed working with you on OpenSocial stuff back in the day when I was at MySpace.

[alecrosa]

I remember working on 5 different apps on the LinkedIn homepage, was great working with you Paul!