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

Fake profiles are usually created to impersonate a real person. They are usually created by the people who know the personal details of a user and create a profile to impersonate him or her and there by causing all sorts of problems for the victim. In February 2007, the father of a South Delhi schoolgirl has approached the Cyber Cell of the Delhi Police’s Economic Offenses Wing complaining against a fake profile of his daughter posted on Orkut. Two men knocked at the girl’s door one day claiming she had invited them through Orkut for discreet intimate relationship. Though the cops can find out the prankster, the victim will suffer a lot socially and even at a personal level. This is a real threat.

Unreal profiles are usually created by real persons who try to act as someone who does not exist in the reality. One kind of these profiles are created by marketers and other people to promote their products and services on Orkut. There is no real harm except getting spam messages and scraps which can easily be avoided by enabling corresponding privacy options. But the real threat with unreal profiles comes into play when a profile is created by a real person to impersonate a non existing person. For example, creating a person’s profile who in the reality does not exist and trying to fool the people and exploit them as if the person actually exists in the reality. This kind of exploiting was very common when the Instant Messaging was introduced and it still continues to exist.

Lets see how Orkut can put some authentication processes in place to combat this serious threat. I have thought of a simple solution and I am sure Google might be trying to implement some kind of solution to tackle this problem.

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