First steps with Opensocial

I got access to the Orkut Developer's sandbox this morning (at the moment Orkut is the only place where you can test Opensocial apps - Ning also has an implementation but it's far too buggy to work with).

I like the idea behind Opensocial a lot. It had to happen, sooner or later.

The problem is that in this case, IMHO, Google have gone for 'sooner' a bit too soon. My Opensocial experience has been rubbish. I'm all for release early, release often but the whole thing seems half-baked to me.

I'm not talking about the API itself, just the implementation, though the API also has issues (for example: no way of identifying app visitors who aren't logged-in members of the social network you're hosted on).

First off: the Orkut sandbox sucks, big time. It becomes marginally more usable once you discover (by scouring the Google Group as there's no relevant documentation) that by appending the magic '&bpc=1' incantation to each Orkut url you can turn off caching and test your apps without reinstalling them under a different name each time you make a change.

Then there's the 'opensocial is not defined' issue: something happened during a rollout of new code across Google's servers and now the opensocial .js file can't be loaded; so nobody's apps are working unless you're on the west coast.

Again, I only know this from speculation on the Google Group where (complaint #3) there aren't any actual Googlers, just confused developers wondering why none of tutorial code works. Facebook did the same thing - set up a developer help board! Let them help themselves! Ignore them, focus on pushing out new code! - and it's annoying. Take shifts, assign an intern, I dunno, just please put us out of our misery and tell us about typos in the specs, servers going down and known bugs as soon as you know about them.

Again, I like the idea and I'm definitely keen to build some Opensocial apps.

Might wait for 1.0, though.