Didja Hear About our New Application for OpenSocial?

The blogosphere (and the mainstream media) has been buzzing about Google's new OpenSocial platform. OpenSocial is a programming model in which developers get a set of common APIs to which they can write against and then distribute their applications across multiple Web sites and applications. It is Google's latest, and most significant foray into social computing. The APIs haven't been released to the public yet, but NewsGator was invited to be one of the early developers in the program. This morning, we announced our first application for OpenSocial, called Didja Hear!?.

Didja Hear!? leverages our feed database and the editorial controls of our Widget Framework to present the images and videos that are most compelling and enjoyable for users to pass on to their friends.

An example of how this works within the Orkut (Google's social networking application) environment is shown to the right.  As Brian Kellner, our VP of Products , notes on the Enterprise RSS Blog, Didja Hear!? is kind of the Web 2.0 equivalent of a water-cooler chat with a great conversation starter. We recommend content across a lot of different  categories like movies, music, sports, celebrities, television, and gadgets. Users them send them on to friends or reply to videos and podcasts shared by their friends.

We're leveraging our database of nearly two million feeds and seven million articles per day to select great content, and we leverage the user's social network to highlight the content that is most compelling to them.

This is another illustration of how our core RSS platform can be extended to provide powerful services beyond RSS aggregation. Included in that list is our recent Social Sites (for Microsoft SharePoint Server) release and our NewsFriends (for Facebook) application.

We'll keep you posted as to when you can get your hands on Didja Hear!?. In the meantime, here are some links to stories that provide additional perspective:

Mashable: NewsGator Joins OpenSocial
Between the Lines: OpenSocial Developers Speak Out
GigaOm: OpenSocial, Google's Answer to Facebook

Technorati Tags: didja hear!?, rss, NewsGator, Web 2.0, Social Networking, OpenSocial