Rogers Communications Inc. and Yahoo! today announced new multi-year agreements that build on the success of their industry-leading broadband alliance. The new agreements expand the scope of customer experience beyond the PC and provide Rogers Wireless customers with the latest and most innovative mobile services.
Rogers and Yahoo! will continue to offer Canadian high-speed Internet access subscribers with an innovative broadband experience, a Rogers Yahoo! customized portal and browser, Yahoo! Search, as well as premium services and content from both Yahoo! and Rogers. Under the terms of the expanded mobile agreement, Rogers and Yahoo! will also bring Yahoo!’s industry leading mobile products - Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 and Yahoo! oneSearch - to customers across Canada.
“We are excited to extend our strong relationship with Yahoo! to bring the best in broadband and mobile experiences to Rogers customers,” said Mike Lee, Chief Strategy Officer, Rogers Communications Inc. “Furthermore, when we looked to integrate our internet and mobile service, Yahoo presented the best-of-breed services through their mobile search tools and Yahoo! Go.”
“We look forward to the expansion of our partnership with Rogers as their partner of choice for broadband services, search, advertising and mobile services,” said Bruce Stewart, Vice-President and General Manager, Connected Life Americas, Yahoo! Inc. “By expanding the scope of our partnership in the mobile arena; we are pleased to offer industry-leading products including Yahoo! Go 2.0 and Yahoo! oneSearch to the millions of Rogers’ customers to allow them to access their content anywhere, anytime, on any device.”
Rogers’ Customers Benefit from Expanded Mobile Offerings - Offering Yahoo! Go 2.0 and Yahoo! oneSearch
Rogers and Yahoo! have a new agreement to bring Yahoo! Go 2.0, Yahoo!’s all-in-one mobile application, to Rogers Wireless users throughout Canada. Yahoo! Go 2.0 brings together email, search, address book, calendar, local listings, maps, Flickr photos, weather, news, sports and financial information - allowing users to stay up-to-date whenever, wherever. Personalized widgets and a sleek carousel design make it easy to unlock the full power of the mobile Internet.
Starting in November 2007, users can download and enjoy Yahoo! Go 2.0 on select smartphone devices, including the Blackberry 8100, 8300, 8310, 8700, and 8800; Motorola Q9, Palm (TREO 750), and HTC Touch. The companies expect to expand the availability of Yahoo! Go 2.0 to Rogers Wireless customers in 2008.
In addition, Yahoo!’s industry leading mobile search service, oneSearch, will become the exclusive mobile Internet search service on the Rogers Wireless mobile portal.
Yahoo! oneSearch is specifically designed for mobile devices, delivering relevant results directly in the first screen and thereby removing the need for consumers to navigate through a sea of links to PC Web sites to find the information they want. OneSearch gives consumers access to news, financial information, weather conditions, Flickr photos, Web images, as well as Web and Mobile Web sites. OneSearch will make it easier for users to find relevant results on their mobile devices, including access to Rogers on-deck and consumables content which will be made available to consumers in the search results. Together, Rogers and Yahoo! are enhancing the search experience for consumers on mobile phones.
Yahoo! will also provide search services to more than 60 Web sites owned and operated by Rogers Media Inc. for an extended period.
November 5th, 2007
Google today announced the release of OpenSocial — a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web — for developers of social applications and for websites that want to add social features. OpenSocial will unleash more powerful and pervasive social capabilities for the web, empowering developers to build far-reaching applications that users can enjoy regardless of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use. The release of OpenSocial marks the first time that multiple social networks have been made accessible under a common API to make development and distribution easier and more efficient for developers.
The proliferation of unique APIs across dozens of social websites is forcing developers to choose which ones to write applications for — and then spend their time writing separately for each. OpenSocial gives developers of social applications a single set of APIs to learn for their applications to run on any OpenSocial-enabled website. By providing these simple, standards-based technologies, OpenSocial will speed innovation and bring more social features to more places across the web. Users win too: they get more interesting, engaging, and useful features faster.
“The web is fundamentally better when it’s social, and we’re only just starting to see what’s possible when you bring social information into different contexts on the web,” said Jeff Huber, senior vice president of engineering, Google. “There’s a lot of innovation that will be spurred simply by creating a standard way for developers to run social applications in more places. With the input and iteration of the community, we hope OpenSocial will become a standard set of technologies for making the web social.”
Learn Once, Reach Across the Web
One of the most important benefits of OpenSocial is the vast distribution network that developers will have for their applications. The sites that have already committed to supporting OpenSocial — Bebo, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, mixi, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING — represent an audience of about 200 million users globally. Critical for time- and resource-strapped developers is being able to “learn once, write anywhere” — learn the OpenSocial APIs once and then build applications that work with any OpenSocial-enabled websites.
“Thanks to the broad adoption of the OpenSocial platform, iLike can now enable artists to reach an additional 200 million music enthusiasts across the wide range of websites that have adopted this new platform,” said Ali Partovi, CEO of social music service iLike, inc. “Building upon the 15 million music fans we already reach through other channels, the OpenSocial platform helps us pursue our vision of becoming the broadest artist-fan communication platform on the web, without having to write custom software for multiple websites.”
Several developers, including Flixster, FotoFlexer, iLike, RockYou, Slide, Theikos, and VirtualTourist have already built applications that use the OpenSocial APIs. A developer sandbox will be available soon at http://sandbox.orkut.com so developers can go in and start testing the OpenSocial APIs. The goal is to have developers build applications in the sandbox so they can deploy on orkut and ultimately other OpenSocial sites.
More Social in More Places
The existence of this single programming model also helps websites that are eager to satisfy their users’ interest in social features. More developers building social applications more easily translates directly into more features more quickly for websites.
“orkut has tens of millions of passionate users who are constantly clamoring for new ways to have fun with their friends and express themselves through orkut,” said Amar Gandhi, group product manager for orkut, Google’s social networking service. “By using OpenSocial to open up orkut as a platform for any developer, we can tap into the vast creativity of the community and make new features available to our users frequently.”
The common method that OpenSocial provides for writing social applications means that websites can engage a much larger pool of third-party developers than they could otherwise. They can direct resources that might have gone to maintaining a proprietary API and supporting its developer community to other projects.
“We are thrilled to be supporting OpenSocial,” said Marc Andreessen, Co-founder and CTO of Ning. “These standards give both creators and members of the over 113,000 social networks on Ning an awesome breadth of feature options and an even greater opportunity to make their networks uniquely their own. OpenSocial is the future.”
Because OpenSocial removes the hassle from developing for social networks, developers can unleash their creativity anywhere that catches their interest. This will translate into a wave of social features in contexts outside of the personal entertainment and games that are traditionally thought of as the social web.
“We fundamentally believe that OpenSocial is the right design philosophy,” said Dan Nye, CEO of LinkedIn. “Some social experiences are about photo sharing, some are affinity-based, some professionally oriented–OpenSocial allows each experience to be distinct and provides them a shared infrastructure for development.”
“Our goal is to make life as simple as possible for developers who want to reach the global hi5 audience,” said Ramu Yalamanchi, CEO of hi5. “OpenSocial provides a simple and practical open standard approach that encourages developers to build innovative applications.”
“OpenSocial is an evolutionary step in the integration of third-party applications into the social web,” said Max Levchin, founder and CEO of Slide. “Google’s standards-based platform gives us deeper access to multiple networks, which allows us to create a much richer user experience.”
“The Internet has fundamentally changed the expectations that consumers have for business applications,” said Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing, salesforce.com. “By combining the Force.com Platform and Visualforce with the latest OpenSocial APIs, developers and customers can build and deploy a new class of socially-enabled enterprise applications in a way that improves CRM, collaboration and other business workflows.”
Three APIs Available Now
The OpenSocial APIs give developers (with users’ permission) access to the data needed to build social applications: access to an application user’s profile information, their list of friends, and the ability to share their activities with friends. OpenSocial resources for developers and websites will be available at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial.
Developers will have access to:
- Three JavaScript and Gdata APIs to access social functions
- A live developer sandbox on orkut at sandbox.orkut.com
- Sample code, documentation, and a support group available at code.google.com
Websites will have access to:
- A tool to help OpenSocial-enable their websites
- A support forum for communicating with Google and other websites
- Sample code, documentation, and a support group available at code.google.com
Developers Already at Work
Dozens of developers have helped test early iterations of the OpenSocial APIs, and Google is grateful for the extensive feedback they have provided:
amiando
Appirio
Bleacher Report
BonstioNet
Brad Anderson
Bunchball, Inc.
BuyFast
Cardinal Blue Software
Chakpak
Chronus Corporation
come2play
CurrentTV
E-junkie
eTwine Holdings, Inc.
Fiendoo Ltd
Flixster
FotoFlexer
Grimmthething
HedgeStop.com
Hungry Machine
iFamily, Inc.
iLike
Indeed.com
KickSports, Inc.
LabPixies Ltd.
LimitNone
LjmSite
LoveMyGadgets
Mesa Dynamics, LLC
MuseStorm Inc.
Netvibes
NewsGator
NY Times
Oberon Media
Outside.In
PayPal
PROTRADE
Puxa
Qloud
RockYou
Shelfari
SideStep, Inc.
Slide
Theikos
TooStep
VirtualTourist
Votigo
Whizz
Widgetbox
Zytu Inc.
Links to these gadgets will be available at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial.
November 2nd, 2007
MySpace, the world’s largest social network, and Google today announced that they are joining forces to launch OpenSocial— a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web. The partnership spearheads an initiative to standardize and simplify the development of social applications. Today’s announcement underscores MySpace’s commitment to supporting standards that foster innovation in an increasingly social Web.
“Our partnership with Google allows developers to gain massive distribution without unnecessary specialized development for every platform,” said Chris DeWolfe, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of MySpace. “This is about helping the start-up spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network. We’re pleased to collaborate with Google to establish a landmark standard for social applications.”
As a founding member of OpenSocial, MySpace will provide critical user mass and platform guidance. The OpenSocial standards are designed to evolve through contribution from the open source community and as new features are developed by various partners. Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.
“As the most trafficked website in the country and the most popular social network in the world, MySpace is one of the leading forces in the global social Web,” said Dr. Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Executive Officer of Google. “We’re thrilled to grow our strategic relationship with MySpace by joining forces on this important initiative.”
“As an application developer, we’re excited to see MySpace adopting the OpenSocial standard for social application development,” said Joe Greenstein, CEO of Flixster. “Application developers have been working with MySpace for a long time—this takes what we can do together to a whole new level. The sheer scale of MySpace makes this extremely exciting for us.”
“We’re all citizens of a larger Web—no network is an island onto itself,” said Aber Whitcomb, CTO of MySpace. “We look forward to continuing to develop great technology with Google and all of the OpenSocial participants. It’s exciting that social networks are getting social with each other.”
The launch of OpenSocial is the first release of technical details for the forthcoming MySpace Platform. Starting tonight, developers can start writing applications for OpenSocial at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial which the MySpace Platform will support at launch.
November 1st, 2007
