I arrived at Moscone Center on Wednesday the 29th to a mob of people making their way towards registration. When I finally made it to a registration table I got my badge and was off to the races.

I wandered around for a bit with the crowd until the keynote started upstairs an hour later. I was really looking forward to this, so I headed up to the third floor and found a seat. The music was good and on the screens over the stage were some of the great Google Chrome Experiments.

What is it?:

‘OpenlySociable Micro’ is a clean, simple and concise way of writing OpenSocial widgets. It uses the Camping microframework and Mongrel to allow developers to write self-contained widgets for OpenSocial-enabled websites with none of the overhead of a full-blown Rails application.

Michael Arrington announced OpenSocial on TechCrunch two days before its official release. Prior to that, there were whispers everywhere about Google’s new social platform, but not many seemed to know what exactly was about to go down. Needless to say, this is good buzz. Two days before ‘launch’ the overwhelming mood among web developers, especially us who dwell in the realms of social networking, was one of intense (even feverish at some points) anticipation. What unfolded over the next few days, combined with what we observed of Facebook’s API venture, provides us a set of best practices that we can apply to an API release.