Plaxo Implements OpenSocial, Ning Goes Live Friday Night

Plaxo has released support for Google’s OpenSocial initiative. The API’s are currently at 0.5 release so Plaxo warns that things are likely to change as OpenSocial moves forward, however in their words “we want to make sure that everyone who’s getting excited about it has a place they can channel their energy and get things running sooner.”

Plaxo support for OpenSocial consists of

* users can now add OpenSocial gadgets to their Pulse profiles
* each gadget also has a full canvas page inside Pulse
* Plaxo supports complete profile and contact info for the profile and friends-list APIs
* support for storing gadget prefs via the people data APIs
* gadgets can create activity streams and publish activity data, which will show up in the Plaxo Pulse stream with rich rendering support
* each activity can be commented on like normal feed items in Plaxo Pulse

Plaxo has also implemented OpenSocial gadget support into their new Dynamic Profiles feature, allowing users to show a separate profile (photo, bio, contact info, interests, etc.) to business contacts and personal friends.

Ning To Go Live Friday Night

We also have unconfirmed news that Ning will be rolling out OpenSocial as an option to its 115,000+ social networks on Friday evening. It will be in beta/sandbox format, and network owners will be made to understand that the API may change one or more times before it’s stable. (Update: Ning is now live with OpenSocial)