Update: My account got activated just after 2 hours of publishing this post. Anyways I just want to keep this post intact to allow other developers to share their experiences.

Dear OpenSocial Team,

First let me congratulate you for the initial success of OpenSocial and evangelizing such an open approach to developing social web applications. I am sure it is going to be a great success and change the way social apps are written. After a long wait and a long stream of clicks on the refresh button in my browser I was finally able to see the website live. But my enthusiasm did not long last. I have read all the documents and every bit of information available in the website. Signed up for the Orkut sandbox account within an hour after the OpenSocial API was live to the general public and was excited about writing my first social web app using OpenSocial. Unfortunately that did not happen and I am still waiting to get approved to use OpenSocial inside Orkut Sandbox environment. I am not sure how long I will have to wait. When I have gone through the messages on the OpenSocial Developers Google forum I have seen many developer waiting to get their accounts activated for Orkut sandbox to experiment with the OpenSocial API for the first time. They do not know how long they have to wait. Few of the developers got access within 30 minutes after signing up. But there are many guys like me who are waiting for their turn and checking their email regularly hoping to get an email about their account activation.

You cannot be unfair to few developers and it has to be open to all the developers at the same time or at least on a first come first serve basis. After all you call it OpenSocial.

I sincerely request you to let all of us know about the wait time and the process you are following to approve the developer accounts.

Yours sincerely,
V V K Chandra

Link: OpenSocial image gallery on TechCrunch

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called “hosts”) that choose to participate.

Image taken from TechCrunch

OpenSocial is a set of three APIs using which developers can access core functions and information of any social network

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Since FaceBook launched its platform, there is a lot of buzz about social networking websites opening up the data to the application developers to deploy applications on the host social network. But the developers have to learn different APIs to launch applications for different social networks. But with OpenSocial, Google has addressed this problem and defined a set of APIs which will be common for all participating social networks. Every participating network should implement the APIs and developers can deploy the same applications across all networks.

For Google, the effort could breathe new life into Orkut. Orkut is pretty popular in Brazil and India.

More updates to come when Google officially launches the OpenSocial.