Google Developer Day was held at Pacifico Yokohama on June 9th. I was briefly present at the keynote speech and also took part in the OpenSocial Panel Discussion session.

Keynote Demo #

During the keynote speech, we unveiled a unique demo of gooHome, showcasing the concept of a social web portal, in which the goo Maps gadget and Photo Viewer gadget work in conjunction with the Photomemo gadget, using OpenSocial from gooHome, which was recently released to the general public. I forgot to mention this in the keynote speech, but this idea was originally based on something shown by a team of developers at the recent Hackathon.

The implementation uses a feature called pubsub, which is included in OpenSocial. pubsub is a fairly simple mechanism: when you publish an object to an arbitrarily created channel, a callback function is called on gadgets that are subscribed to the same channel, and the object is delivered. We will soon add documentation about pubsub to goo Developer's Kitchen.

We would also like to thank the Photomemo team for developing the Photomemo gadget and the Photo Viewer gadget for this demo.

OpenSocial Panel Discussion #

Another event I participated in was a panel discussion. This time, I was joined by Kawasaki-san from Recruit, who I was also with at the recent DevSummit, as well as Kawagishi-san from mixi and Oikawa-san from Google.

The content of the talk was more about the SocialWeb than OpenSocial, and covered the currently available OpenSocial within that, as well as the expanding world of the SocialWeb. I only recently realized that the goals of the mixi app and the goo home gadget are completely different, so I tried to make that point clear.

summary #

As I said during the Panel Discussion, I feel there is still room for growth in Japan's view of the Social Web. I fully understand that we cannot simply import the worldview of the Social Web from overseas, as real names are not preferred compared to other countries and the largest SNSs are closed, but I believe that it will definitely become a technology that is in demand in the near future.

If you agree with this, please join us at SocialWeb Japan.