Your website can host third party OpenSocial apps integrated with your site's social network. A site that can host OpenSocial apps is called an OpenSocial container. The basic requirements for containers are detailed in the OpenSocial API Specification. OpenSocial apps typically include gadgets, so you will need to provide a way to allow a users to add gadgets to their pages. You can provide your own directory, link to hand-picked URLs, and/or allow users to add gadgets by URL. Gadgets are typically implemented as individual IFrames within your containing page.

To host OpenSocial apps, your website must implement the OpenSocial API Specification. In most cases, this means that you connect your own social network's backends to the OpenSocial Service Provider Interface (SPI), which is part of Shindig, to allow an OpenSocial app to access your site's data. The SPI implements:

• Retrieving people information
• Storing and retrieving activities
• Storing and retrieving persistent data
• Sending messages (optional)

If you have questions about implementing your own OpenSocial container, visit the Implementing OpenSocial Containers discussion forum for input from other engineers building social networks.

Let's get this Shindig started

Apache Shindig is an open source project that helps you start hosting OpenSocial apps quickly by providing the code to render gadgets, proxy requests, and handle REST and RPC requests. On the Apache Shindig website you'll find information on how to checkout the source and build your own Shindig server as well as how to contribute to the Shindig project.

OpenSocial Container Compliance Testing

You can use the OpenSocial Compliance Tests to see if your site complies with the OpenSocial specification. The test gadget reports compliance at 3 levels: a required level and two optional levels.

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