MySpace Platform Insults OpenSocial

[Alex E]

MySpace unveiled its platform today, which claims to use OpenSocial
but has too many limitations to allow developers to build cross-
(social)-platform apps.

This is setting a very dangerous precedent for the future of
OpenSocial and Google needs to step in right now and force MySpace to
comply with the spec. As it stands now, MySpace is the least common
denominator among the OpenSocial implementations. This means that in
order to write cross-platform apps, developers have to limit
themselves to only using features that MySpace chooses to support. If
you let every site pick and choose their own pieces of OpenSocial, you
will soon end up with a pretty small common denominator.

Here are the current limitations of the MySpace platform (as far as I
can tell after spending the entire afternoon reading their docs and
forums):

1). No way to provide your own gadget XML file (only lets you paste
the HTML/JS content into a web form).

2). Can't import your own JS files from your servers. MySpace
provides their own version of jQuery but what if you want to use GWT
or any other JS library (or, more importantly, your own libraries).
It won't suffice to just mash everything into one giant text file and
copy/paste into a form.

3). The Persistence and Activity APIs are not implemented. If
developers have to build and host their own database just for MySpace
you might as well get rid of Persistence API support from other
networks. No one wants to work with 2 or more different data models.

This is Google's chance to step in and prevent OpenSocial
implementations from mirroring what happened with the web browsers
(and worse).

[Alex E]

(altering the subject to be more accurate)

[weber1]

Don't you think they are going to add all that in a subsequent
release?!

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[Alex Epshteyn]

It seems that they plan to add the Persistence & Activity APIs and
support for XML files. However, they seem bent on not letting you use
external Javascript imports and making your code pass through Caja
even though it's already in an iframe. This is incompatible with the
other OpenSocial implementations.