1. Recap NJIT OpenSocial Hackathon

    Last weekend (Feb. 5th - 6th) I was invited to speak about OpenSocial at the OpenSocial Hackathon organized by Elsevier and the New Jersey Institute of Technolog (NJIT). Now that I have completely slept off my jet lag (two 8h flights with a 6h time difference within 4 days is really no fun at all) it’s finally time for a short recap:

    The whole hackathong was an amazing event, relaxed atmosphere, great organization, interesting people and very dedicated participants. It was great to see all the great ideas students come up with, if you just give them some open APIs and 24 hours to hack.

    This, as well as the final results, shows how powerful open standards like OpenSocial can be to create innovative mash ups that connect data data from different sources intelligently and that are integrated right into user’s existing workflows.

    Personally I spoke more about the history of OpenSocial, different usages, the OpenSocial Foundation and OpenSocial’s future with OpenSocial 2.0, but also managed to get some technical stuff in by talking about new OpenSocial features like templates, proxied content and data pipelining ;-)

    You can find the slides here:

    Kudos also to the folks at Elsevier for such a good OpenSocial integration in their Sciverse Applications platform.

  2. IPC 2011 Spring Edition

    I’m very happy to annonce that I’ll be speaking at the International PHP Conference this spring in Berlin:

    Mashing up JavaScript – Advanced techniques for modern web apps

    Speaker: Bastian Hofmann

    Nowadays many modern web applications are solely relying on JavaScript to render their frontend. But if you want to create mashups, load data from many different places or include external widgets into your site, you are quickly running into boundaries because of browser and security restrictions. In this presentation I will talk about techniques helping you with such problems.

    http://phpconference.com/2011spring/

    I’m looking forward to this talk very much since it’s a topic that I haven’t talked about before and will cover a lot of cool stuff for modern JavaScript based web applications.

  3. Confoo 2011

    I’m very happy to have been chosen to speak about OpenID and OpenSocial at this years Confoo conference in Montreal, Canada (March, 9th to March, 11th).

    Here arte the details:

    Distributed Identities with OpenID

    The era of many separated logins and identities in the web is slowly coming to an end. Currently many of the big players are spurring this on with their own proprietary solutions, but open standards are starting to get more support as well with OpenID being the most promising one. In this session I will show how OpenID works for users and developers, where it currently fails and how OpenID is planned to evolve in the future.

    How to create social apps for millions of users

    Social apps have become very popular in the last years. In this session I will show you how to create an OpenSocial app which can be used by over 900 million users on many social networks around the world. After introducing you to the main concepts behind OpenSocial I will demonstrate live that it is easier than you think to develop a rich social app. Additionally to the basics like accessing the user’s social graph or integration with external APIs, I will also highlight features that will help you with a quick viral distribution, tight integration into the user’s social experience and access through mobile devices.

    http://confoo.ca/en/speaker/bastian-hofmann

  4. First VZ GeekCon

    On December 7th we organized the first GeekCon in Berlin. It was a very fun event and I’m looking forward to the next event.

    This time I did two sessions. I introduced the technical background of VZ-ID and VZ-Login and I spoke about the Federated Social Web.

    Here are the slides:

  5. OpenSocial Europe Summit 2010

    On December 6th I attended the OpenSocial Europe Summit which was hosted by SurfNET in Utrecht (NL). The main focus was on the usage of OpenSocial in education software and it was great to see OpenSocial being adopted in new and different contexts outside of classical social networks.

    I also was able to do two presentations, one on OpenSocial App programming and an impromtu session on the Federated Social Web. Here are the slides: