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.